This twelve-minute video by Tony Heller of Real Climate Science, released just yesterday, does a great job of exposing the deceptive use of data on which climate alarmism depends. Heller begins with the National Climate Assessment that recently went out to journalists and policymakers. It included a set of charts and graphs that superficially seemed to support the claim that we are experiencing alarming changes in the Earth’s climate, as summed up in this graphic. Click to enlarge:
One funny thing, though: One of these graphs begins in 1960, another in 1979, another in 1983, and so on. If you are trying to show the effects of “climate change” in a scientific way, shouldn’t you use the same starting point for all of the phenomena (arctic sea ice, wildfires, heat waves, etc.) you are attributing to “climate change”? Well, sure. Unless you are committing fraud. One of the things I learned in my many years of evaluating data for professional purposes was that what a line graph “proves” depends largely on where you choose to begin it.
Here is the video. You will find it eye-opening:
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The Guardian commits fraud
Under the heading, "The climate crisis explained in 10 charts", they first put out a series of reasonably uncontroversial graphics. But when it comes tp the crucial fourth graphic, they can find nothing to support their story other than Mann's "hockeystick" -- long discredited among people who know anything about it. Not even Mann defends it these days. He recently chose to lose his lawsuit against Tim Ball rather than reveal his workings behind the graph. No other graph of the global temperature record shows such an absurd spike. Excerpt only below
From the rise and rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to possible solutions
Billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide are sent into the atmosphere every year from coal, oil and gas burning.
The problem - rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
The level of CO2 has been rising since the industrial revolution and is now at its highest for about 4 million years. The rate of the rise is even more striking - the fastest for 66m years - with scientists saying we are in "uncharted territory".
The causes - fossil fuel burning
Billions of tonnes of CO2 are sent into the atmosphere every year from coal, oil and gas burning. There is no sign of these emissions starting to fall rapidly, as is needed.
The causes - forest destruction
The felling of forests for timber, cattle, soy and palm oil is a big contributor to carbon emissions. It is also a major cause of the annihilation of wildlife on Earth.
The consequences - global temperature rise
The planet's average temperature started to climb steadily two centuries ago, but has rocketed since the second world war as consumption and population has risen. Global heating means there is more energy in the atmosphere, making extreme weather events more frequent and more intense.
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The Idolatry of Environmental Extremism
David Limbaugh
A bizarre incident at Union Theological Seminary illustrates why many Christians believe that internal forces, not external ones, represent the greatest threat to the church.
Students at this seminary prayed to a collection of plants in its chapel, which triggered a raft of criticism on Twitter. The school defiantly defended its action in a series of tweets.
“Today in chapel, we confessed to plants,” the school tweeted. “Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?”
Some Twitter respondents observed that the seminary and its students have lost their minds, but I think it’s worse than that. Insanity might mitigate this sacrilege, but deliberately perverting theology is another matter.
Pastor Greg Locke tweeted, “This is utter nonsense. Absolute theological bankruptcy in every way. Your Seminary is a cemetery.” Another Twitter user quipped, “What kind of penance did the plants give after the ‘confession?’”
What possesses this misguided institution to refer to plants as “beings”? What gross theological error leads them to pray to and encourage others to pray to them? Idolatry is no trifling matter, which is underscored by at least two of the Ten Commandments and the entirety of Scripture.
God repeatedly warns His people against chasing after false gods and punishes them for disobeying, including their being taken into captivity by the Assyrians and Babylonians. The Apostle Paul warned, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator — who is forever praised. Amen,” (Romans 1:25). To the Corinthians he said, “Therefore my dear friends, flee from idolatry” (1 Cor. 10:14).
Is it not pantheistic to confess to plants, as if they were holy? Is it not blasphemous for Christians to declare that plants “sustain us” and provide us a gift that we should honor?
The Bible emphasizes that God created and sustains all things: “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15-17); “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Hebrews 1:3).
In its tweets the school piously asserted, “We are in the throes of a climate emergency, a crisis created by humanity’s arrogance, our disregard for Creation.” It said we must create “new spiritual and intellectual frameworks by which we understand and relate to the plants and animals with whom we share the planet.”
Notice the school capitalized the term “creation,” another deferential nod to created things instead of the Creator, an attitude it reinforces when saying we must create spiritual and intellectual frameworks to “relate to” plants.
Similarly, the school went on to boast of its deep commitment to “inter-religious engagement,” saying: “Union’s daily chapel is, by design, a place where people from all the wondrous faith traditions at Union can express their beliefs. And, given the incredible diversity of our community, that means worship looks different every day!”
Of course Christians should be responsible stewards of the environment, and of course they should love people of all faiths and treat them graciously and respectfully. But it is astounding that in the name of “diversity” and “tolerance” the school encourages the worship of other gods — and especially in its houses of worship. As the prophet Jeremiah said, “The people of Judah have done evil in my eyes, declares the LORD. They have set up their detestable idols in the house that bears my Name and have defiled it.”
The seminary admonishes humanity for its arrogance in dealing with the environment, but how much more arrogant are we to pretend we have as much control over the global thermostat as proselytizing environmentalists claim? How much more arrogant are we to ignore God’s clear scriptural commands in both testaments against worshipping idols? Sadly, among those idols are the high priests of political correctness and man’s desperate efforts to please them above God.
Just as Paul cautioned against idolatry, he warned about false teachers: “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths” (2 Tim. 4:3-4).
People in a sacred position as teachers of God’s Word have an even higher duty not to lead their students astray, as those who teach will be judged more strictly (James 3:1). There are many things that reasonable Christians may differ on, but worshipping and serving other gods is not one of them. It is sad that an institution ostensibly dedicated to teaching Christianity would give itself over to blatantly false doctrine.
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'Switch off the air-con, walk to school, make a sandwich': Baby boomer blasts 'selfish' students for skipping class to protest against climate change
An open letter penned by a frustrated baby boomer has resurfaced in the wake of the global school strike for climate rallies.
More than 300,000 protesters in 110 towns and cities across Australia flooded the streets on Friday as part of a global movement to demand action on climate change.
The viral letter, originally shared to social media last year, is addressed to 'school kids going on strike for climate change'.
'You are the first generation who have required air-conditioning in every classroom,' the letter reads
'You want TV in every room and your classes are all computerised.
'You spend all day and night on electronic devices.
'More than ever, you don't walk or ride bikes to school but arrive in caravans of private cars that choke local roads and worsen rush hour traffic.'
The author then continue by taking a swipe at young people's consumer culture, arguing the youth of today opts to replace 'expensive luxury items to stay trendy'.
'How about this... Tell your teachers to switch off the air-con,' the letter said.
'Walk or ride to school. Switch off your devices and read a book.
'Make a sandwich instead of buying manufactured fast food.'
The post swiftly takes a turn, targeting the character traits of young Australians.
'No, none of this will happen because you are selfish, badly educated, virtue signalling little 'princesses', inspired by the adults around you who crave a feeling of having a 'noble cause' while they indulge themselves in Western luxury and unprecedented quality of life.'
'Wake up, grow up and learn to research facts and think for yourself and not blindly accept the words and thoughts of others.'
Protesters were demanding a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2030 and a transition to 100 per cent renewable energy.
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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 September, 2019
A climate of burning money
BJORN LOMBORG
World leaders will soon arrive in New York for a climate summit likely to do little more than add to the hysteria drowning out any sober talk on climate policy. Amid warnings that we have days left to act, politicians will jostle to share the spotlight with celebrity activists such as 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, who came from Europe by wind-powered boat. Hurricane Dorian looms large over proceedings as a harbinger of doom.
After 30 years of failed climate policy, more of the same is not the answer. Since the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, our use of renewable energy has increased by only 1.1 percentage points — from meeting 13.1 per cent of the world’s energy needs in 1992 to 14.2 per cent today. Most nations are failing to deliver on carbon cut undertakings already made — yet politicians will be feted in New York for making new, empty promises.
Enough is enough. We must confront climate change, but hyperbole and bluster do the planet no favours. This is the time we should be having a sensible discussion on cost-effective ways to reduce the worst of climate change’s damages.
Thunberg exposes the vacuous hypocrisy of the movement. She rightly points out that everybody talks big but does little. Since Bill Clinton was in the White House, a succession of global leaders has promised to cut emissions drastically. Their falling short is not because of a lack of interest, urgency or goodwill. While the US lack of climate policy is regrettable, global failure cannot simply be attributed to Donald Trump’s presence in the White House. The reason is that the main climate solution being pursued is costly and ineffective.
Alternative energy has increased so little because green energy remains incapable of meeting all of our needs met by fossil fuels. Replacing cheap and reliable fossil fuel energy with more expensive and less reliable energy alternatives weighs down the economy, leading to slightly lower growth.
This means the Paris treaty is likely to cost between $US1 trillion and $2 trillion ($1.5 trillion and $2.9 trillion) a year, making it the costliest treaty in history. Not surprisingly, research shows that it will increase poverty. Its effects are not evenly felt; increasing electricity prices hurts the poor the most.
At great cost, the Paris Agreement will reduce emissions by just 1 per cent of what politicians have promised. The UN body organising the Paris Agreement finds that if all its promises were fulfilled (which they are not on track to achieve), it would cut about 60 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalents, whereas about 6000 billion tonnes are needed to get to the promised 2C target.
Yet politicians are being celebrated for going even further than the Paris treaty’s current promises, vowing to make entire economies “carbon-neutral” within decades.
It speaks volumes that few governments ever establish the costs of such promises. One of the few that has is New Zealand. A government-commissioned report found that aiming for net zero emissions by 2050 would cost more than the entire current annual national budget. There would be “yellow vest” riots worldwide if such policies were genuinely pursued.
We need to challenge the ever-more rampant talk about “catastrophic” climate change. Rhetoric has become unpinned from science.
According to the UN climate science panel’s last major report, if we do absolutely nothing to stop climate change, the impact will be the equivalent to a reduction in our incomes of between 0.2 per cent and 2 per cent five decades from now.
Work by Nobel laureate climate economist William Nordhaus based on the UN findings shows the likeliest outcome is a cost to the planet of about 3 per cent of gross domestic product in coming centuries. That should be taken seriously — but it does not equal Armageddon.
The havoc wreaked by Hurricane Dorian is tragic but it cannot be pinned on global warming, according to the UN’s climate scientists, who say “globally, there is low confidence in attribution of changes in tropical cyclone activity to human influence”. Indeed, a study shows hurricane damage currently costs 0.04 per cent of global GDP.
As we expect a global increase in prosperity and hence resilience, unchanged hurricane costs will drop fourfold to 0.01 per cent by 2100. And even though global warming will make hurricanes fewer but stronger and double total damage, the net impact still will be a smaller 0.02 per cent of GDP.
As a study from the Royal Society concluded, cutting CO2 has “extremely limited potential to reduce future losses”. Instead, adaptation can be up to 52 times more effective.
As it has become obvious the political response to global warming is not working, more focus has been given to personal actions. But this doesn’t add up, either.
Thunberg took a boat from Europe to New York. (The trip awkwardly will result in increased emissions because the crew is flying to New York to take the boat home; Thunberg is reportedly purchasing “carbon offsets”).
But if all 4.5 billion flights this year were stopped from taking off, and the same happened every year until 2100, temperatures would be reduced by only 0.03C, using mainstream climate models — equivalent to delaying climate change by less than one year by 2100.
Nor will we solve global warming by giving up meat. Going vegetarian is difficult; one US survey shows 84 per cent fail, most in less than a year. Those who succeed will reduce their personal emissions by only about 2 per cent.
And electric cars are not the answer. Globally, there are only five million fully electric cars on the road. Even if this climbs to 130 million in 11 years, the International Energy Agency finds CO2 equivalent emissions would be reduced by a mere 0.4 per cent of global emissions. Put simply, the solution to climate change cannot be found in personal changes in the homes of the middle classes of rich countries.
The Paris Agreement cannot do much — just as the Rio and Kyoto pacts before it mostly failed — because in essence this approach requires rich countries to promise future economic hardship to achieve very little. Indeed, the real problem is that most of the 21st-century emissions are not being emitted by the rich world: if every single rich country stopped all CO2 emissions today and for the rest of the century — no plane trips, no meat consumption, no petrol-powered cars, no heating or cooling with fossil fuels, no artificial fertiliser — the difference would be just 0.4C by the end of the century.
Solving climate change requires getting China, India and all the other developing countries on board to cut emissions. But of course their goal is to lift their populations out of poverty with cheap and reliable energy. How do we square that?
A carbon tax can play a limited but important role in factoring the costs of climate change into fossil fuel use. Nordhaus has shown that implementing a small but rising global carbon tax will realistically cut some of the most damaging climate impacts, at rather low costs.
This, however, will not solve most of the climate challenge. We must look at how we solved past major challenges — through innovation.
The starvation catastrophes in developing nations from the 1960s to the 80s weren’t fixed by asking people to consume less food but through the Green Revolution in which innovation developed higher-yielding varieties that produced more plentiful food.
Similarly, the climate challenge will not be solved by asking people to use less of more expensive green energy. Instead, we should dramatically ramp up spending on R&D into green energy.
The Copenhagen Consensus Centre asked 27 of the world’s top climate economists to examine policy options for responding to climate change. This analysis showed that the best investment is in green energy R&D. For every dollar spent, $11 of climate damages would be avoided.
This would bring forward the day when green energy alternatives are cheaper and more attractive than fossil fuels, not just for the elite but for the entire world. Right now, despite all the rhetoric about the importance of global warming, we are not ramping up this spending. On the sidelines of the 2015 Paris climate summit, more than 20 world leaders made a promise to double green energy research and development by 2020.
Spending has inched up from $US16bn in 2015 to only $US17bn last year. This is a broken promise that matters.
We must also focus on adaptation — this can generate a broad range of benefits at low cost and help with challenges beyond global warming. And we should remember one of the most powerful development and climate policies is to accelerate economic growth for the world’s worst-off.
The most powerful way to achieve this is through opening up trade opportunities. That is very far from the direction the world is heading in right now. Yet research shows that a successful Doha round could increase the annual income of the world’s poorest by about $US1000 a person in 2030. This is not only good in and of itself but it also would deliver much more resilience and reduce vulnerability to any climate impacts the future will bring.
Sadly, growth policies, adaptation, green R&D and an optimal CO2 tax are not what we will be hearing from the climate summit in New York.
But after 30 years of pursuing the wrong solution to climate change, we need to change the script.
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Genetic Modification of Crops Is 'Rape,' Botanist Says
Last week, a Native American botanist argued that the genetic modification of crops is a form of rape. Perhaps the next step in the #MeToo movement involves returning to the low crop yields before the Green Revolution, which saved billions of lives by making food more available through genetic modification, among other things.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY-Syracuse, called corn "one of our deepest and oldest relatives." In an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, she humanized corn as the "Corn Mother," saying, "Corn is sacred because she gives us her children in return for protecting us."
Kimmerer wasn't talking about the sweet corn Americans love to eat today, but rather the native corn that comes in hundreds of varieties. She contrasted this wild corn with the genetically modified corn her neighbor grows.
"There’s a word for forcible injection of unwanted genes," Kimmerer said. "Rape."
This botanist does not just humanize corn — she wishes to enlist it in the #MeToo movement.
Wisconsin Public Radio noted that the sweet corn "has been altered by agribusiness," but the article did not mention the role genetically modified corn has played in the Green Revolution, which has been credited with saving one billion lives and averting the doomsday prediction of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb.
In the 1960s, plant disease expert Norman Borlaug spearheaded research into new farming methods that supercharged agriculture and fed the people whom Ehrlich predicted would starve. Borlaug's dwarf wheat resisted a wide spectrum of pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than traditional varieties. In Pakistan, wheat yields rose from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million tons in 1970. In India, they rose from 12.3 million tons to 20 million tons.
In 1968, Ehrlich had predicted that "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." Since Ehrlich's prediction, India's population has more than doubled, its wheat production has more than tripled, and its economy has grown nine-fold. India fed far more than 200 million more people. Ehrlich secretly omitted this prediction from later editions of The Population Bomb.
Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work on the Green Revolution. He has arguably saved more lives than anyone else in history, and he did it through genetic modification.
The Green Revolution combined genetic modification with new fertilizers and agro-chemicals, controlled water supply, and added new mechanical cultivation. These new methods may strike an advocate for native practices as strange or even barbaric, but they've saved more than a billion people across the world.
Those who wish to see corn as a sacred "Corn Mother" represent a return to the ancient animistic view of the world. Treating plants as sentient beings may sound hip and "progressive," but Kimmerer's rejection of genetic modification is backward, and it could be dangerous. Would she really want to reverse the Green Revolution and bring back pre-modern levels of starvation?
Does Kimmerer really mean to accuse Norman Borlaug, the man who arguably saved more human lives than anyone else in history, of rape?
In the most recent sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the woman who was supposedly the victim denied having any recollection of the assault. It seems the insentient corn Kimmerer wishes to defend from "rape" would be similarly silent in the case against Norman Borlaug.
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It's Time for Climate Confessions
"Where do you fall short in preventing climate change?" NBC asks for "Climate Confessions."
Repent, for the end of the world is near! No, it’s not some disheveled dude standing on a street corner with a sandwich board. Instead, it’s the new NBC News Climate Confessions interactive. If you worship nature at the altar of the Church of Climatology, you can now confess your environmental sins in six different categories: plastics, meat, energy, transportation, paper, and food waste.
“Blast the AC? Cook a steak once a week?” NBC asks. “Where do you fall short in preventing climate change? Tell us with Climate Confessions.” Or if, like us, you merely want a good laugh, you can read the confessions of others — both real and dripping with sarcasm.
“I wish I had been born a vegan and then maybe it would be easier. I can’t seem to give up meat,” says one.
“I sleep with the air conditioner on year-round and justify it to myself by recycling,” admits another.
Worse, says another, “I commute 30 miles to work every day in a car by myself.”
And in a perfect illustration of the Left’s redistributionist mindset: “I want to install solar panels but am waiting for state / federal incentives to do so!”
We tend to prefer contributions such as, “I require at least half a roll of TP when wiping,” and, “I like my house to be 85 in the winter and 55 in the summer. Deal with it, hippies.” But to each his own.
When it comes to green theology, there are cult-like True Believers, and there are nominal adherents who kinda sorta believe climate change is a problem but aren’t exactly willing to upend their lifestyles to mitigate it. And we can be sure that the former will continue to preach until blind devotion is achieved.
How bad is the propaganda for this faux religion? “Tens of thousands of high school students in cities nationwide plan to skip classes Friday to attend Global Climate Strike marches calling for immediate action to end climate change,” reports USA Today. “They will be part of a global joint protest aimed directly at the adults who they say are ignoring the destruction of the planet.”
The story is tagged as being in San Francisco, which is rather humorous given that President Donald Trump’s EPA is set to deliver a notice of violating environmental standards to the city because of its rampant homeless problem, caused by leftist rent-control policies.
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Scaring children witless
Eco-alarmists are feeding kids a daily diet of fear and doom
‘Eco-anxiety’ has become the latest fashionable malaise. Apparently it is afflicting many children. That kids as young as four and five are feeling anxious about the climate is not surprising – after all, they are fed a diet of doomsday scenarios by the new eco-alarmists. Having effectively been given permission to feel hyper-anxious about the coming Armageddon, many youngsters have wholeheartedly embraced the role of the stressed-out victim of humanity’s eco-crimes.
As usual, the media and popular culture have been at the forefront of cultivating this narrative about eco-anxious children. In a new HBO series, Euphoria, an over-the-top anxious teenager embraces what we might call the eco-doom excuse. She says there is little point in kicking her drug habit because ‘the world’s coming to an end and I haven’t even graduated high school yet’.
Another HBO series, Big Little Lies, features a scene in which the daughter of one of the main characters has a panic attack in class after being relentlessly subjected to climate scare stories. There is a wonderful moment in which the teacher asks the eight-year-olds, ‘How many gallons of water does it take to make a single pound of sausage?’. As if participating in some kind of secular ritual, the chorus of children reply in unison: ‘A thousand!’
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it has become a sign of virtue for both children and adults to make a display of the disturbing symptoms of eco-anxiety. Such symptoms show that we are aware and concerned. In turn, the idea that climate-change concern is causing mental suffering adds up to further proof of the damage caused by climate change. In recent months there have been many reports about the mental-health consequences of climate change. For climate alarmists, the discovery of this alleged new malaise of eco-anxiety is a bonus. Linking climate catastrophism to the deterioration in children’s mental health allows them to boost the eco-fear narrative. It is a good example of the concept of joined-up scaremongering.
Joined-up scaremongering usually involves taking a pre-existing danger and adding the idea that it poses a unique threat to children. Why? Because if you mention the word ‘child’, people will listen. You can raise the moral stakes by claiming a child is at risk. People won’t just listen to you – they will endorse your demand that ‘something must be done’.
For instance, campaigners against poverty know that they are far more likely to gain sympathy for their cause if they draw attention to what is now called ‘child poverty’. It is as if socio-economic injustices are not compelling enough on their own terms – no, they have to be recast as things that harm children in particular.
Or take campaigners on Third World issues. They know that mentioning ‘child labour’ or ‘child soldiers’ or ‘starving children’ is far more likely to resonate with the public than general calls for economic assistance. As an acquaintance of mine who works in the charity sector put it to me: ‘Mention the word children, and the money rolls in.’
Children, therefore, become a kind of moral resource that can be used to promote policies and causes. Which is why, time and again, discussions about supposed catastrophic threats like climate change tend to focus on ‘our children’s future’.
It is bad enough that society has become so devoted to scaring children about the future survival of the planet. What is even more corrosive is the medicalisation of children’s concern about the future, the transformation of it into a mental-health problem. The number of children supposedly suffering from a climate-change-related mental-health problem is growing all the time, we’re told. Although reports on eco-anxiety rarely specify the percentage of children suffering from it, we are assured that the number is rising.
Claims of an epidemic of eco-anxiety are typically vague. ‘No stats are available on the prevalence of eco-anxiety, but some experts have noted an increase in public anxiety around climate change’, writes one journalist. One ‘expert’, Susan Clayton, who co-authored a report titled Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance, speculates: ‘We can say that a significant proportion of people are experiencing stress and worry about the potential impacts of climate change, and that the level of worry is almost certainly increasing.’
What is really increasing is the determination by experts and activists to construct this new mental disease of ‘eco-anxiety’.
Indeed eco-anxiety sounds suspiciously like any other form of anxiety. According to one description: ‘Symptoms of eco-anxiety include anxiety, depressed mood, insomnia, and feelings of loss, fear and helplessness. Symptoms in children may also include separation anxiety and somatisation – signs suggestive of physical illness but without a physical explanation. For example, stomach aches, headaches and extreme fatigue.’ Given that most of these symptoms are already associated with a variety of other mental-health conditions, it seems likely that normal anxiety is being rebranded as a psycho-eco-illness with the simple addition of the prefix ‘eco’.
Commentators acknowledge that eco-anxiety is more of a metaphor than a scientifically informed diagnosis. They usually say that it isn’t yet ‘an official diagnosis’ and then imply that it’s only a matter of time before it will be included in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As one observer says, ‘Although not yet listed in the mental-health manual… a number of professional organisations such as the UK Council for Psychotherapy, the American Psychological Association and the Wellcome Trust have written about it’.
Apparently, it is not enough to scare children about their future and then medicalise their fears – scaremongers are now targeting parents, too. ‘Rising numbers of children are being treated for “eco-anxiety”, experts have said, as they warn parents against “terrifying” their youngsters with talk of climate catastrophe’, says the Daily Telegraph. Yet the project of terrifying children about the climate is actively promoted at all levels of society. Pinning the blame for ‘eco-anxiety’ on parents is a little dishonest.
This goes far beyond parents. We live in a world in which scaring children has become a form of ‘raising awareness’ about the alleged impending extinction of humanity. We live in a world in which environmental catastrophists use children to educate their supposedly irresponsible elders. We live in a world in which it is apparently okay for climate activists to hide behind a 16-year-old girl and to use her youthful and innocent image to foist political views on the public. Worst of all, we live in a world in which the language of mental illness is being used to ramp up the politics of fear. And we wonder why children feel scared.
SOURCE
ANOTHER GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Ms Thunberg has got them talking. Four current articles below
No place in debate for climate contrarians
Consensus enforcement is a potent new force in climate science where sceptical views increasingly are being silenced as a danger to public good.
Academic website The Conversation said this week it would ban comments from those it judged to be climate deniers and lock their accounts. The Conversation editor and executive director Misha Ketchell justified the ban on sceptical comments as a defence of “quiet Australians” who “understand and respect the science”.
The Conversation’s shift to a monologue reflects a deeper push that is raising alarm worldwide.
Contrarian scientist Jennifer Marohasy is among those listed on an international table of climate sceptics whose views should not be published. Marohasy says she is “proud to be listed as part of the resistance to what will one day be recognised as postmodern science”.
“I base my arguments and conclusions on evidence, and I apply logic. Of course, science is a method. Science is never ‘settled’,” she says. “Those who appeal primarily to the authority of science and the notion of a consensus are more interested in politics. Central to the scientific method is the hypothesis that can be tested: that can potentially be falsified. We must therefore always be open-minded, tolerant and ready to be proven wrong.”
Also on the list published by University of California, Merced, were international climate scientists Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen and Richard Tol, as well as academics Bjorn Lomborg and Australia’s Ian Plimer and Maurice Newman.
The list was drawn from research published in the journal Nature, which juxtaposed 386 prominent contrarians with 386 expert scientists by tracking their digital footprints across 200,000 research publications and 100,000 English-language digital and print media articles on climate change.
In a statement accompanying the article, lead author Alex Petersen says: “It’s time to stop giving these people (contrarians) visibility, which can be easily spun into false authority.
“By tracking the digital traces of specific individuals in vast troves of publicly available media data, we developed methods to hold people and media outlets accountable for their roles in the climate change denialism movement, which has given rise to climate change misinformation at scale.”
Curry says the paper “does substantial harm to climate science … There are a spectrum of perspectives, especially at the knowledge frontiers. Trying to silence or delegitimise any of these voices is very bad for science.”
The Conversation’s ban is focused on reader feedback. But Marohasy says the online publication has long rejected her articles and comments.
“Despite my dozen or more publications in international climate science journals, editors at The Conversation have been intent for some years on excluding me,” Marohasy says. “I went to great lengths some years ago to get an article published in The Conversation based around a paper I had published in international climate science journal Atmospheric Research.”
Marohasy included charts to show the effect of how remodelling a temperature series through the process of homogenisation can significantly affect a temperature trend.
“The editor wouldn’t consider publishing my article, claiming it was nonsense,” she says. “Yet I was simply explaining what the Bureau of Meteorology actually do.” Marohasy says she has had a similar experience with comments. “Once I tried to get some comments into a thread. Everything seemed to be going well and then all my comments disappeared,” she says. “They deleted a whole afternoon of discussion I was having.”
Ketchell says he received an incredible response — “both supportive and hostile” — after he drew attention to the ban on sceptical comments. The disclosure came as The Conversation became part of a global media push by 250 outlets to raise awareness of climate change issues that was instigated by the Columbia Journalism Review. Ketchell tells Inquirer the ban was not part of the Covering Climate Now initiative.
According to the CCN website the media entities joined forces to foster urgency and action over the climate “crisis” and devote extra time to what CJR claimed was “the defining story of our time”. A briefing on the initiative rejected suggestions it was turning journalists into activists.
“This concern distorts what news-gathering is about,” CJR says. “Journalism has always been about righting wrongs, holding the powerful to account, calling out lies.”
Ketchell says handling the views of the small group hostile to climate science is a complex media-ethics question “and it’s one on which reasonable people can differ”.
In response to questions from Inquirer, Ketchell says everyone in Australia is entitled to free speech but not everyone is entitled to have their words published on The Conversation. “It is part of the role of a journalist to filter disinformation and curate a positive public discussion that is evidence-based and doesn’t distort the range of views by giving undue prominence to a noisy minority,” he says.
Ketchell says comments challenging the scientific basis of climate change will be regarded as off-topic unless the article is specifically about this subject.
“We moderate anything that is a deliberate misinformation and distortion of facts or attempts to misrepresent arguments or community members,” he says.
“We know climate sceptics are very good at derailing constructive conversations, so we’ll remove comments that attempt to hijack threads or to push an agenda or argument irrelevant to the discussion.”
Ketchell says commenters are encouraged to engage with the article they are commenting on and to back up their claims with credible research.
The website will be more careful to police the “small and vocal group of climate science contrarians whose passion overwhelms their ability to assess the evidence”, he says.
Opinion-based sceptics have ample opportunity to have their say on social media and in many media outlets.
“As long as they aren’t allowed to overwhelm the quiet Australians who understand and respect the science, I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” Ketchell says.
SOURCE
Pollies cold on climate
Despite a global push for more action on climate change, momentum has drained away.
This month was supposed to be the one in which a global push for higher ambition on climate change took flight.
Child prophet Greta Thunberg set sail for New York by luxury yacht to save petrol, a climate emergency was declared around the world, and workers were given permission to join students in a climate strike.
Despite this, momentum behind real action by government has been steadily drained away.
In Australia, the Labor Party’s proposal to dump the targets that cost it dearly at the federal election effectively has let the Morrison government off the hook.
Few world leaders are lining up to deliver what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had in mind when he called them together for a New York conference to boost ambition. The New York meeting, scheduled for September 23, was conceived as a show of global defiance at US President Donald Trump’s decision to ditch the Paris Agreement.
Rather than a competition for more robust action, as was intended, the New York agenda looks deflated.
Key world leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, will not be attending. Instead China will send a lower-ranking official, and there are mixed signals about whether the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emissions nation will offer to do more.
As things stand China, which is responsible for 26.83 per cent of global emissions, has pledged to keep increasing them until about 2030.
The EU has been unable to agree on a uniform position for 2050, with a split between the coal-dependent east and more progressive west.
A pushback is building in Germany against higher energy prices and the impact of strict new emissions regulations on a struggling car industry. Renewable energy investment across much of Europe has stalled.
The EU admits it is not on track to meet its 2030 target of a 40 per cent emissions cut on 1990 levels.
Relations with Brazil have fractured following the election of development-focused President Jair Bolsonaro and a resurgence of clearing in the Amazon.
The US, with 14 per cent of global emissions, is showing no signs of pulling back from its threat to quit the Paris Agreement next year despite achieving greenhouse gas emissions cuts from a switch from coal to gas.
In Australia there is little mood politically for greater action.
The federal opposition has all but surrendered its pre-election target to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
As it takes stock of its unexpected election loss, Labor looks likely instead to focus on a 2050 target of being carbon neutral.
The backdown was first mooted by opposition assistant climate change spokesman Pat Conroy in The Australian last week when he said a net zero target by 2050 had to be “the overriding objective”.
Anthony Albanese said Labor “will examine our short and medium and long-term commitments on where we go on climate change but we won’t re-examine our principles. We want to work towards zero emissions by the middle of this century.”
Climate change spokesman Mark Butler could not be specific. “What medium-term targets numerically are, whether it’s 2030 or 2035, given the passage of time, is something we’ll engage over in the next couple of years,” Butler said.
Labor’s backdown followed a stinging appraisal from its green wing, the Labor Environmental Action Network, which highlighted that the party had been unable to put a price on its climate change action plan during the election.
“It couldn’t say how much it would cost, where the money was coming from or what economic dividend it would deliver or save,” LEAN said. “It is basic Australian politics — how much, who pays, what does it save? We had no answers.”
Former leader Bill Shorten told Sky News on Monday he agreed that Labor’s climate policies had cost it votes at the election in May and said he supported a review of the position.
“I do think Australians want to see action on climate change so I am confident that will be Labor’s position”, Shorten said. “But as for a specific (2030 target) number, I will allow the reviews and the reconsiderations of policies to take their course.”
Ironically, the 45 per cent target being abandoned by Labor is what Guterres has been calling for in New York from all nations.
Labor’s capitulation has given the Morrison government a free pass on what could otherwise have been an uncomfortable time. The Prime Minister will not be attending the New York climate conference despite being in Washington for a state reception with Trump.
Instead Australia will be represented by Foreign Minister Marise Payne and climate change ambassador Patrick Suckling.
Australia is not expected to speak at the conference or offer anything above the existing Paris Agreement pledge of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 26 per cent to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. The federal government has yet to make a call on whether to join the growing global push to declare a target to become “carbon neutral” by 2050.
How exactly the carbon neutrality will be calculated remains a vital question for Australia which, by some measures, may have achieved the target already.
It’s hard to know.
A 2013 paper in the journal Biogeosciences found the year-to-year variation in the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by natural processes is bigger than Australia’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Research published in the journal Nature in 2014 found that record-breaking rains had triggered so much new growth across Australia that the continent turned into a giant green carbon sink to rival tropical rainforests including the Amazon.
The study found that vegetation worldwide had soaked up 4.1 billion tonnes of carbon in 2011 — the equivalent of more than 40 per cent of emissions from burning fossil fuels that year.
Almost 60 per cent of the higher than normal carbon uptake that year, or 840 million tonnes, happened in Australia.
Subsequent research has shown that much of the additional carbon store was lost in following years because of fire and drought.
But a full understanding of the carbon cycle is still in its infancy.
Pep Canadell, from the CSIRO, says there is as yet no robust information on whether Australia is a net carbon sink or emitter when all natural processes are taken into account.
Canadell is leading a big international assessment under the Global Carbon Project to investigate but says results are still a couple of years away.
He says the global experience has been that most of the benefits from the natural carbon sinks are more than offset by human emissions of non-CO2 gases, mainly methane and nitrous oxide.
Scientists, however, are only starting to understand the bigger picture. Nature is able to lock away about half of the additional carbon dioxide load from human activity and it has shown itself to be very resilient to increasing human emissions.
A paper published in April found that global land and ocean sinks had largely kept pace with rising carbon dioxide emissions since 1958 and were still absorbing about 50 per cent of atmospheric CO2.
Canadell says the results are remarkable because of their unseen, and often unacknowledged, benefits.
“The CO2 sinks are like a 50 per cent discount on climate change,” Canadell says. “If it wasn’t for the sinks, we would have double the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, and a doubling of the impacts due to global warming.”
How these sinks will be accounted nationally puts a fresh perspective on what carbon neutrality at a national level may eventually mean. It highlights also the folly of discussions being hijacked by negative extremes.
The latest, and unexpected, shot against fearmongering was issued by World Meteorological Organisation secretary-general Petteri Taalas to Finnish newspaper Talouselama.
Taalas told the paper while climate scepticism had become less of an issue, the challenge was now coming from “doomsters and extremists”. “Climate experts have been attacked by these people and they claim that we should be much more radical,” Taalas said.
He said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports had been “read in a similar way to the Bible: you try to find certain pieces or sections from which you try to justify your extreme views”. “This resembles religious extremism,” Taalas told Talouselama.
Following publication of his comments, Taalas issued a clarifying statement that he was not questioning the need for robust action. “In my interview, I made clear that a science-based approach underpins climate action and that our best science shows the climate is changing, driven in large part by human action.
“However, I pointed out that the science-based approach is undermined when facts are taken out of context to justify extreme measures in the name of climate action,” he said. “Action should be based on a balanced view of the science available to us and not on a biased reading of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of which WMO is one of the parent organisations.”
Taalas said the challenges were immense.
The lesson from Labor in Australia and the UN in New York is that the political challenges remain equally large.
The boom in renewable energy has spawned a serious unintended consequence with the release of large quantities of the world’s most potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) is 23,500 times more warming than carbon dioxide and is widely used to make wind turbines, solar panels and the switching gear needed to run more complex electricity systems.
Research has shown leakage of the little known gas across Europe in 2017 was the emissions equivalent of putting an extra 1.3 million cars on the road.
The warming potential of SF6 was identified in 2008 by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which said what had been hailed as an environmental success story could turn out to be a public relations disaster for solar.
Scripps says SF6 is difficult to break down and roughly 60 per cent of what goes into a switch’s vacuum chamber ends up in the atmosphere.
The latest research from Britain is that levels of SF6 in the atmosphere are rising as an unintended consequence of the green energy boom.
According to the BBC, just 1kg of SF6 warms the Earth to the same extent as 24 people flying London to New York return. It also persists in the atmosphere for a long time, warming the Earth for at least 1000 years.
The increase in SF6 in the atmosphere reflects the way electricity production is changing around the world.
Mixed energy sources including wind, solar and gas have resulted in the use of many more connections to the electricity grid.
The increased number of electricity switches to prevent serious accidents has resulted in the use of more SF6 gas to stop short circuits and quench arcs, making electrical circuits safe.
Carbon copies
A loose coalition of countries has made the pledge to go “carbon-neutral” by 2050 but they do not include any of the major emissions nations and it remains unclear exactly what the term means.
SOURCE
Student climate strike is slacktivism
On a Friday afternoon, would you rather be stuck in school at a maths lesson or be outside at a protest with your mates? No prizes for guessing what most children would prefer.
As a result, it’s easy to dismiss today’s climate demonstration as mere ‘slacktivism’… students giving up their Saturday morning sport to attend a protest would have been a far more powerful statement.
And besides, is it really a ‘strike’? Not going to school — which means students miss out on their own learning — isn’t even remotely comparable to not going to work as part of industrial action.
Of course, it’s great if students are interested in politics, care about global issues, and want to exercise their right to protest government policy in a liberal democracy. And yes, issues with potential long-term consequences like climate change are especially important for youth.
However, if any student really wants to improve policy in the long-term, the best way to do this is to become better educated — and learn to understand the various perspectives of every issue. Getting involved in politics should be in addition to their schooling, not ever in conflict with it.
Today’s ‘strike’ has been endorsed by education unions, among others (with shades of “How do you do, fellow kids?”). Unions are obviously free to support whatever action they want, though students shouldn’t be pressured into joining.
But do unions support the principle of all students being able to skip class to attend a protest on any issue? Or just on political issues where the union leaders happen to agree with them? Maybe unions wouldn’t be so supportive if students went on ‘strike’ to protest against inter-generational debt, advocating for budget cuts for the sake of future generations.
Students should be able to skip school occasionally, providing they have parental permission, go through the normal processes of their school, and the usual rules around attendance and truancy are still applied consistently.
Parents — not governments — are fundamentally responsible for the moral education of their children. If parents are happy for their kids to miss lessons for whatever reason, then so be it.
But in a time of growing polarisation, the last thing we need is teachers bringing political partisanship into schools.
SOURCE
Dozens of protesters are caught with single-use plastic bottles while marching during the Global Climate Strike
Normal Greenie hypocrisy
More than 30,000 people took to the streets of Brisbane to march in the Global Strike 4 Climate march on Friday.
Several of the protesters came under fire by the city's Lord Mayor, Adrian Schrinner, who labelled them as 'very disappointing' in a video shared to Twitter.
But the mayor was criticised for sharing the video, with some people calling his actions 'petty'.
'Very disappointing to see so many single-use plastics at today's environmental rally in Brisbane's CBD,' Mayor Schrinner captioned a video shared to Twitter.
The Mayor suggested people should instead stop by his mobile office where he was giving out reusable bottles. 'If only they made it to Lord Mayor's mobile office or the recent Green Heart Fair to get their own reusable drink bottles!'
The video showed a series of people walking in the march clinging onto plastic cups and bottles, all the while wearing shirts and carrying handmade signs that advocate for climate change.
Mayor Schrinner even took aim at Greens member, Michael Berkman, who carried a plastic bottle despite wearing a 'Stop Adani' shirt.
But not everyone was on board with Mr Schrinner, as many took to Twitter to slam the Mayor. 'That's the best you can come up with when the people of Brisbane turned out to have their voices heard?' one commented.
'Wow, this is the pettiest and saddest thing I've seen today,' one person tweeted.
Others said the bottles had likely been re-used because many didn't have labels.
'Because you can't refill a plastic bottle? Considering a lot don't have labels or are soft drink bottles with water I think they are being used by people with a social and environmental conscience,' another wrote.
'30,000 people take a stand and that's your petty takeaway?' a woman commented.
SOURCE
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22 September, 2019
Russia Announces Plans for Coal-Digging Surge
Despite the climate crisis and environmental concerns, the country says it aims for a big dig of the carbon-rich rock. Much of it will be extracted in new Arctic fields.
"I would like to congratulate everyone whose life is connected with coal mining, with this key industry in our country’s economy," President Vladimir Putin said this week while greeting the governors of Russia's main coal-extracting regions.
The meeting took place in the Kremlin on the eve of Miner’s Day, the annual celebration devoted to workers in the coal mining industry. Government ministers and seven regional leaders were seated at the table were, among them Krasnoyarsk region governor Alexander Uss and Kemerovo region governor Sergei Tsivilev.
Coal mining has been a key industry in Russia for a long time. And its role will be no less significant in the future, the participants of the meeting said.
Big growth
Over the last 10 years, Russia has boosted its annual coal production by more than 30% to a total of 440 million tons, and the country is now the world’s third-largest producer, Energy Minister Alexander Novak said.
In the same period, investments in the industry have surged 150%. "This is, of course, a significant figure," Novak said.
The production is to continue upwards. According to a draft development program, annual coal production might reach as much as 670 million tons in the course of the next 15 years.
The government will assess the development program in September, the Kremlin said.
New projects
A series of new coal projects stand behind the growth figures. Almost half of Russia’s current 58 coal mines in operation have opened in the course of the last 20 years. And several more are in the making, including in the Arctic.
In the Taymyr Peninsula, the large territory stretching into the far northern Kara Sea, there are plans for extractions of more than 25 million tons per year over the next five years.
The VostokCoal company is in the process of developing the first of its big number of licenses on the northeastern tip of the peninsula. The license areas of Severnaya Zvezda (Northern Star) company are located nearby. The two companies intend to build two major port terminals in the area for export of the coal.
The black rocks will ultimately play a crucial role in the ambitious development of the Northern Sea Route. President Putin has requested in his state six-year plan that shipping on the Arctic route is to reach 80 million tons per year by 2024.
Asian buyers
Russia sees the Asian market as the destination for its growing coal production.
"Our coal companies are now actively conquering the Asia-Pacific region [and] we see the potential for coal consumer growth exactly in this direction," Energy Minister Novak told President Putin.
Meanwhile, the European market is gradually shrinking as EU countries actively replace coal with alternative energy sources. Prices are dropping and Russian coal exports to the region are in decline. According to the Kommersant business daily, several Russian companies are now running into deficits because of faltering sales to Europe.
SOURCE
Michael Mann's Tree-Ring Circus
This has been a tough week for climate hustler Michael Mann, who lost his defamation and libel lawsuit against respected climatologist and warming skeptic Dr. Tim Ball at the same time it was announced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that there has been no U.S. warming since 2005.
Mann, who poses as a climatologist at Penn State, has had his court case against genuine climate scientist Dr. Tim Ball dismissed, with Mann ordered to pay court costs, for failure to produce supporting evidence to prove his claim that global temperatures took a sharp upward turn when the Industrial Revolution and fossil-fuel use began pouring CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
He didn’t because he can’t, and the fact is that the global warning he speaks of is Mann-made, a fantasy based on a career of perpetrating climate fraud, as indicated by NOAA’s report that there hasn’t been any U.S. warming for nearly a decade and a half and maybe even beyond that. As noted by James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, in a piece for Real Clear Energy:
When American climate alarmists claim to have witnessed the effects of global warming, they must be referring to a time beyond 14 years ago. That is because there has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, according to updated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In January 2005, NOAA began recording temperatures at its newly built U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). USCRN includes 114 pristinely maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states. NOAA selected locations that were far away from urban and land-development impacts that might artificially taint temperature readings…
There is also good reason to believe U.S. temperatures have not warmed at all since the 1930s. Raw temperature readings at the preexisting stations indicate temperatures are the same now as 80 years ago. All of the asserted U.S. warming since 1930 is the product of the controversial adjustments made to the raw data.
The use of properly positioned temperature recording stations coupled with satellite date, a relatively recent innovation that covers the whole earth, has given us a more realistic picture than computer models that can’t even predict the past and fraudulently manipulate raw data from dubious sources.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts documented the inaccuracy of old weather station data used by NASA on his SurfaceStations.org website. Watts said that “90 percent of them don’t meet (the government’s) old, simple rule called the ‘100-foot rule” for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence.” Many of the U.S. stations were in locations such as paved driveways, near rooftop exhaust vents, even near idling jet engines.
In 2016, Mann testified before the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee that actual data didn’t really matter because we could actually see climate change happening. The Washington Times noted both his appearance and at least one contradiction to his claims based, not on computer models, but on actual empirical observation:
Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious…
Mr. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, spoke before the committee June 17 in Phoenix… Mr. Mann told the panel that “the signal of climate change is no longer subtle, it is obvious,” citing hurricanes, flooding in Texas and South Carolina, the California drought and “record heat” in Arizona.
Skeptics have hotly challenged the link between rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and “extreme weather” events, noting, for example, that hurricane activity is on the decline.
A nine-year “hurricane drought” of Category 3 storms starting in 2006 beat the previous mark of eight years from 1861-1868, the longest such streak since such recording began in 1851, according to a May 2015 study by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Mann has proven adept over his career at making controversial, no, fraudulent adjustments made to the raw data. Mann might be remembered as one of the participants in what Investor’s Business Daily dubbed a “tree-ring circus” -- the Climategate scandal. As IBD noted at the time:
Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in 2009, when emails were unearthed from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. In one email sent to Mann and others, CRU director Philip Jones speaks of the "trick" of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:
"I've just completed Mike's nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline (in global temperatures)," the email read.
It was that attempt to "hide the decline" through the manipulation of data that helped bring down the global warming house of cards.
The graph created by professor Mann and his colleagues carefully selected and manipulated tree-ring data to supposedly prove that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts -- in a pattern resembling a hockey stick -- in the 20th century due to man-made greenhouse gases. Mann et al. performed the neat trick of making the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.
As Investor’s Business Daily also noted:
The graph relied on data from trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. Here, too, the results were carefully selected. Just 12 trees from the 252 cores in the CRU's Yamal data set were used. A larger data set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity showed no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages. They were not included.
“Hiding the decline” and any actual evidence that global warming hype was nothing more an attempt by climate change scammers to impose what has become a religion. MIT Professor Richard Lindzen is quoted in the Daily Caller questioning the tenets of this new religion:
Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons…
Lindzen compares global warming to past politicized scientific movements: the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, the MIT professor argues that global warming goes even beyond what these past movements in terms of twisting science.
“Global Warming has become a religion,” writes Lindzen. “A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint.”
The goal is to use climate change as a means to increase government power over every aspect of our lives, what we make, how we make it, what energy we use, what cars we drive, even what food we eat. And now the high priests of the global warming religion are demanding what other false religions have demanded -- human sacrifices upon their altar. As Michael Mann has found out, facts are stubborn things and tree rings don’t always ring true.
SOURCE
Campus Protesters Fail to Shut Down Climate Science Lecture
Climate Scientists Respond to Climate Alarmism in 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary Campaign
Dr. Patrick Michaels, senior fellow at the CO2 Coalition, and Dr. Caleb Stewart Rossiter, the Coalition's executive director, were invited by the Georgetown University College Republicans to participate in its "Climate Forum: A Rebuttal" event on Thursday, September 19. The CO2 Coalition is an alliance of 50 climate scientists and energy economists who describe themselves as "unalarmed" about the impact of industrial carbon dioxide on the planet.
About 100 student protesters who were preparing to take part in a Climate March occupied the room and shouted down the speakers as soon as the event began. Georgetown University Police cleared the room and administrators let students re-enter after conducting a bag search to ensure the safety of the speakers and the student organizers. They warned the protesters that if they did not wait with their comments until the question period they would be in violation of the student conduct code. Michaels and Rossiter both had the chance to speak with a now-respectful audience of 75, evenly divided between protesters and other students.
Michaels, a climatologist, demonstrated that UN climate models have over-predicted global warming threefold for the past 40 years. He said this was because the models assume more warming from industrial carbon dioxide than it actually creates. Rossiter, a statistician, explained the link between low access to electricity and low life expectancy in Africa. He also presented UN data showing that, despite talk of a "climate crisis," rates of hurricanes, droughts, and sea-level rise had not changed during the era of industrial carbon dioxide. At the end of the talk, Georgetown University Police felt it necessary to escort Dr. Michaels and Dr. Rossiter to their cars.
Rossiter commented: "I'm sort of getting a taste of my own medicine -- 'hoist with my own petard,' as Shakespeare wrote -- since I was a disruptive student in the same way 40 years ago, protesting the Viet Nam war and U.S. support for apartheid in South Africa. I respect the students' desire to promote what they see as justice. I just think they're wrong on the facts. That they wouldn't engage in discussion until threatened with suspension shows that they probably know it too."
The CO2 Coalition has written the president of Georgetown University to express its deep gratitude for the professionalism the police showed and the commitment the administration showed in successfully defending free speech on campus.
Via email from The CO2 Coalition: info@co2coalition.org
San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle should be held to Clean Water Act standards as human waste pollutes their waterways
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement in reaction to President Donald Trump calling on the EPA to take Clean Water Act action against west coast cities that put human waste into natural waterways:
“In March of 2018, San Diego County, California cities of Imperial Beach and Chula Vista sued the International Boundary & Water Commission-United States Section and Veolia Water North America West over the ‘devastating pollution discharges’ from the Tijuana River. Last night, President Trump stated that he anticipated that the United States Environmental Protection Agency will take action against San Francisco and potentially, Los Angeles, which have exacerbated a homeless problem to such an extent that they are polluting the Pacific Ocean with drug needles and raw human waste.
“While some might laugh at the notion that the washing of raw human waste into the San Francisco Bay should be cited by the EPA, the truth is that the effects can be catastrophic. Just last year in Seattle, Washington (which should be in line for EPA sanction as well), opioids were found in mussels pulled from the Puget Sound. Mussels, which filter sediment for nutrition, became contaminated due to the washing to raw human waste from a drug addicted homeless population directly into the Sound.
“It is beyond ironic that the far-left urban policies of cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle are creating an environmental disaster for the coastal sea life which these same politicians claim to revere. An EPA lawsuit holding these eco-socialist elites to the same standards which they would hold a private company should create an existential values clash on the left coast. And hopefully, they will become ‘woke’ to the reality that their urban policies fail to serve any of their purported values.”
SOURCE
GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Four current articles below
Fact-free prophet takes vicious turn
Andrew Bolt
GLOBAL warmists are turning vicious. Now guru Tim Flannery likens me to a paedophile.
Has Flannery, our former Chief Climate Commissioner and now a professorial fellow at Melbourne University, become unhinged? For me, his outburst confirms that Flannery represents the death of reason.
In the taxpayer-funded Conversation, Flannery claims that man-made global warming and dwindling resources may wipe out most of the Earth's nearly 8 billion people. "British scientist James Lovelock has predicted a future human population of just a billion people,” he writes. "Mass deaths we predicted."
Typical Flannery. In fact, Lovelock later admitted he was too "alarmist", and Flannery was, too: "We don't know what the climate is doing."
But Flannery, undaunted, rages over the slaughter he imagines is coming: "The climate crisis has now grown so severe that the actions of the denialists have turned predatory: they are now an immediate threat to our children. "My children ... will probably live to be part of that grim winnowing -- a world that the Alan Joneses and Andrew Bolts of the world have laboured so hard to create."
Then a third suggestion that I'm a child abuser. "They are threatening my children's wellbeing as much as anyone who might seek to harm a child."
How low can Flannery go? If I thought there was the slightest chance of our emissions killing my children, I'd work day and night to cut them. But I don't think they're at all threatened by global warming. What really threatens them is the monstrous, self-righteous unreason that Flannery represents. In 2004, Flannery, actually a mammal expert, said man-made warming would cause such droughts that "there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century's first ghost metropolis".
Yet Perth is flourishing, and Professor Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, says "as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought".
In 2009, Flannery warned "this may be the Arctic's first ice-free year". Not even dose. In 2015 Flannery predicted more cyclones: "We're more likely to see them more frequently in the future." But the following year we had the fewest cyclones in decades, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agrees cyclones have become rarer.
In 2017, Flannery claimed global warming was drowning Pacific islands like Tuvalu and this was a "widespread phenomenon". In fact, TuValu has grown by 2.9 per cent over four decades, and Professor Paul Kench found 43 per cent of Pacific islands have also grown, and just 14 per cent shrunk.
And now Flannery claims "global hunger has increased for the last three years because of extreme weather events". Really? In fact, the Food and Agricultural Organisation reports that world grain crops have been at record levels for the past three years.
What an extraordinary record of false claims, yet Flannery is still treated as an oracle by the Conversation, the ABC and Melbourne University.
But the worst of it is that this false prophet has cost Australians so much. In 2007, Flannery falsely claimed our dams would run dry: "Even the rains that fall will not actually fill our dams and our river systems." He added: "In Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane, water - supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months."
State Labor governments freaked, and raced to build desalination plants not just for those cities, but Melbourne, too. The cost was massive — some $12 billion. But this was another Flannery fail: the rain kept falling, and those desal-plants were essentially mothballed. What a waste.
Here's another example of the cost of Flannery's flummery. Flannery also urged us to scrap our reliable coal-fired electricity plants and use more geothermal power instead. "There are hot rocks (underground) in South Australia that potentially have enough embedded energy in them to run Australia's economy for the best part of a century," he said. "The technology to extract that energy and turn it into electricity is relatively straightforward."
The Rudd Government believed him, and gave a $90 million grant to a geothermal plant in which Flannery was a shareholder. Yet another Flannery fail. The plant was a technological nightmare and was scrapped.
So how should I describe Tim Flannery, who misquotes experts, misstates science, makes dud predictions, urges us to waste billions of dollars and scares children with absurd claims of "mass deaths"? I won't do a Flannery and call him a "predator". I'll stick to the facts. The man is a crank.
From the Courier Mail, 19/9/19
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg overruled department to block wind turbines on scenic island
The former environment minister Josh Frydenberg went against the advice of his departmental experts when he blocked two wind turbines on Lord Howe Island in 2017, consigning the world heritage-listed island to relying on diesel fuel for the bulk of its electricity.
A freedom of information request by the Guardian has uncovered that the minister took the unusual action of blocking the project under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, deeming it “unacceptable”.
It was one of two projects that Frydenberg rejected while environment minister, the other being a nursing home at Sydney’s Middle Head on federal land.
Now the Guardian can reveal that his decision was taken despite the advice of his own department, strong support from the majority of residents on Lord Howe Island, the governing board of the island, and even another federal government agency – the Australian Renewable Energy Agency – which had offered $4.6m in funding towards the renewable energy project.
The department’s natural heritage section 23 November 2016 advice was that “the proposed action is unlikely to significantly impact the Island Group’s world heritage values” and that moving the island away from reliance on weekly deliveries of diesel would help secure its Unesco world heritage status.
The department went on to say: “The proposed turbine site was selected because it is in close proximity to the existing powerhouse and electricity network and is one of the least visible cleared pieces of elevated land on the island.”
“Practical access and operation considerations limit the turbines’ physical size. The turbines are not permanently fixed but can be lowered for maintenance and other purposes.”
It said the proposed turbines were a similar scale to the existing aviation towers near the project site.
There was some concern expressed from the migratory birds section of the department about whether the turbines might harm Lord Howes’ bird population.
But the final recommendation from the department was that risks could be mitigated by the Lord Howe Island board’s proposal to shut down the turbines at sunset when shearwaters returned to their nests.
“The department considers that impacts on listed migratory birds could potentially be mitigated, for example through development and implementation of the adaptive management approach proposed in the referral,” it said.
But having outlined the reasons why the project should be given the go-ahead, the department, perhaps pre-empting the minister’s attitude, advised that he could still oppose it, and included the paperwork for him to do so.
At the time, [radio jock] Jones was regularly railing against windfarm projects, and there was opposition to windfarms within the Coalition. In 2014, the then treasurer, Joe Hockey, called wind turbines “utterly offensive”, while former prime minister Tony Abbott said in 2015 they were “ ugly” and “noisy”.
A spokesperson for the current environment minister, Sussan Ley, said then minister Frydenberg considered that “the proposed wind turbines would create a considerable, intrusive visual impact and that this would affect the spectacular and scenic landscapes for which the island group is recognised”.
“The minister concluded that the proposal would be an inappropriate development for Lord Howe Island and that the impacts on the island group’s heritage values could not be sufficiently avoided or mitigated,” she said.
The spokesman said the minister had given “thorough consideration to a range of matters” before deciding that the wind turbine proposal would have clearly unacceptable impacts and that the decision did not affect the solar component of the island’s energy project.
Lord Howe Island’s Unesco listing has identified “human-caused climate change” as a key threat. The organisation has a policy which calls on world heritage sites to investigate renewable power options.
Lord Howe Island is now exploring what can be done with solar and batteries to meet the island’s needs. New South Wales spends $750,000 a year on shipping diesel to the island to provide power for its 350 residents.
SOURCE
New coal mine that would have provided 1,100 jobs to hard-pressed families is scrapped after green activists from Sydney's north shore sent 2,530 objection letters
The construction of a controversial coal mine has been blocked after planners received a series of objection letters from city-based environmental activists.
The multi-million-dollar Bylong Valley coal mine was commissioned by Korean company Kepco, which claimed the mine, north-east of Mudgee, would generate $300million for the New South Wales economy and create 1,100 jobs.
After a large amount of opposition from the community, the project was given to the NSW Independent Planning Commission for review in October last year.
But today it was revealed the project's demise came after a spate of complaints by residents of Sydney's northern beaches, 250 kilometres away from the proposed mine site.
Out of 3,193 comments to the commission, 2,530 objections came from Lane Cove Coal and Gas Watch, The Daily Telegraph reported. 'These people should not be allowed to comment on something that is not on their doorstep,' Mid-West Regional Council mayor Des Kennedy said. 'People here want those jobs, but at the public meetings they were bussing in activists from all over the place.'
While 350 submissions received by the commission were largely objections, most of them came from people living more than 60 kilometres away.
Lane Cove Bushland and Conservation Society vice-president Ron Gornall said the environmental group maintain their objections. 'Our group was opposed to the mine … like a lot of environmental groups, we look at other areas,' he said.
None of the 14 government agencies consulted objected to the construction of the mine.
While the commission acknowledged the economic benefits the mine would bring, they also said it was not an ecologically sustainable development, ABC reported.
'The commission found the mine's predicted air quality, biodiversity, noise, subsidence and visual impacts are acceptable and/or can be effectively managed or mitigated,'the commission said in its determination.
'It raised significant concern about other longer-lasting environmental impacts.'
'The predicted economic benefits would accrue to the present generation but the long-term environmental, heritage and agricultural costs will be borne by the future generations.'
Kepco began working on the project in 2010 and construction was supposed to start this year.
SOURCE
Our universities have caved in to lazy groupthink
In the lead-up to Friday’s Global Climate Strike, enlightening emails have found their way into staff and student university inboxes. These communications are as illuminating as they are disheartening, as they once again reveal the extent to which our institutions of higher education have been captured by ideologically driven activists.
The array of carefully crafted messages that have been doing the rounds at Notre Dame, Queensland, NSW, La Trobe and Melbourne universities range from the subtle suggestion that staff may like to “accommodate” striking students, to robustly and actively encouraging students to ditch their studies and take to the streets to yell about climate change.
Without exception, all students have been informed that they will not be penalised for absenteeism and that there will be absolutely no repercussions for non-attendance. This is completely at odds with standard university attendance requirements, which are markedly unforgiving.
Perhaps the most telling of all emails, however, has come from the desk of Stephen Trumble, head of the department of medical education at the University of Melbourne, who writes: “All students are encouraged to consider joining with staff in participating in the Global Climate Strike on Friday 20th September. The medical school supports sustainable development and mitigating the effects of climate change.”
It seems that the priorities of Melbourne University’s medical school are misguided. Australians want doctors who are trained to diagnose and cure illness, not doctors who are trained to be eco-warriors. “One of our course outcomes,” Trumble concludes, “is that Melbourne MD graduates should practise medicine in an environmentally sustainable manner so as not to contribute to this immediate problem.”
One wonders whether this might look like a surgeon turning off the operating theatre lights and poking around inside the unfortunate patient by candlelight.
It smacks of ideological totalitarianism, where staff and students at our universities are being compelled to conform to the orthodoxy prevalent on campus.
The question is, what will become of the rebels who choose to go to class? Their presence in the lecture theatres will single them out as dissidents and they will be judged accordingly as climate change deniers. Never mind what they may think about climate change in private, their public inaction will condemn them in the eyes of their peers.
As it turns out, the same fate is awaiting those Victorian public servants who, rather than joining their colleagues on the streets of Melbourne, have chosen to remain at their desks.
Unsurprisingly, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who this week achieved the honour of being the highest paid premier in the country, is encouraging his employees to ask for “flexible working arrangements” so they can help bring his city to a standstill.
Taxpayers are essentially paying public servants to take the day off. It is unlikely that the Department of Premier and Cabinet would display the same degree of leniency towards staff if they were to down tools on a Friday afternoon to attend an anti-abortion rally.
What we are seeing on campus and indeed in government is the spirit of the mob at work. This concept is explored by Douglas Murray in his latest book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. “We are,” he observes, “going through great crowd derangement. In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant.”
One of the most profound impacts that postmodernism and identity politics have had on our universities is the crippling of intellectual inquiry. When universities are fiercely and repeatedly advocating diversity as a fundamental academic value, the reality is that diversity of opinion has been all but banished from many classrooms and lecture theatres, where the predominantly liberal-left world view, once concealed within the humanities, has become the wider orthodoxy.
The fact remains, students want diversity of opinion on campus. In a recent survey of 500 domestic students commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs, 82 per cent of respondents, no matter what their political persuasion, said university was a place where they should be exposed to different views, even if those views are challenging or offensive. The results also showed that students were looking outside the university to be challenged or to find out alternative points of view, with 58 per cent of students saying they were more exposed to new ideas on social media than on campus.
Things must be dire indeed if students are finding greater diversity of opinion on the notoriously skewed platforms of Twitter or Facebook.
The Global Climate Strike shows that universities are no longer the chief institutions through which knowledge is preserved, generated and disseminated. Australian campuses are rapidly becoming places where intellectual inquiry is being crippled and the free exchange of ideas is severely limited. Collectivism and groupthink have no place in our universities, which to all intents and purposes are failing in their purpose.
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 September, 2019
The ‘Climate Strike’ is a crock that exploits kids
This Friday, in advance of the United Nations Climate Summit, students across the country will walk out of their schools as part of a Climate Strike. In New York City, the Department of Education has given its stamp of approval to the walk-out and won’t mark it as an absence, making it less “a strike” and more a coordinated effort by the school system to force political action on children.
Tweeted DOE: “We applaud our students when they raise their voices in a safe and respectful manner on issues that matter to them.” Does it? The department is only giving kids a pass to skip school to protest on this one issue. So while school brass may applaud students raising their voices, only preapproved political posturing will be granted official protest status.
Sure: Children are our future, goes the adage. Shouldn’t they have a say in what happens to their planet?
But what “say” are they having by marching around with signs — repeating slogans and talking points spoon-fed to them by … adults?
Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted about the strike on Monday, “Young people are taking action against Climate Change in record numbers. You know why? BECAUSE. WASHINGTON. WON’T. We are running out of time. Our kids aren’t waiting. We can’t either. #ClimateStrike”
But it’s hard to ignore that in this call for action there’s no, well, action. They’re literally doing what they’re urging politicians to stop doing: talking.
We could have had an army of teenagers cleaning up parks or beaches instead of striking and making signs. Teens could have led the way by not using cars or plastic utensils for the day.
Or how about something as simple as this: Give up their phones for a day (or, heck, 15 minutes!) to save energy. (Right!)
Instead, expect stories on Saturday about how much garbage the protesting kids left behind.
In my Russian-speaking community, people took to Facebook to discuss the similarities they saw to their time in the Soviet Union. One mom posted that the strike is “Soviet-style brainwashing and propaganda” Another mom wrote that the particular issue doesn’t matter; “having children demonstrate on school time was the Soviet way.”
One Park Slope elementary school sent parents a note that the entire school will be walking out for the strike. A mother of a 6-year-old told me, in response: “I am all for people supporting causes they believe in, but do not force your causes and beliefs on my first-grader.”
Another mom told me she believes in climate change and thinks the government should take action but finds the strike absurd. She’s afraid to single her kid out by making him skip it and isn’t speaking up.
Trump says Green New Deal would turn US into 'hermit nation'
In America in 2019, it really ought to be OK for parents to say: “My kids are not your props and, no, it’s not OK for them to spend school time making climate-change signs or walking out in protest.”
Memo to DOE: Some parents would actually prefer their kids to be in class learning than taking part in one-sided political theater (though, it’s true, at some schools kids who strike won’t be missing much).
Nor should parents be put on the spot and have to declare whether they want their kid to attend the organized protest. This isn’t a school subject. It’s not standardized testing or dissecting a frog. Parents shouldn’t even have to opt in to have their child attend (and whether even that should be allowed is arguable).
In any event, the real test to see if kids care about the Climate Strike would be to do it after school or on a weekend. After all, almost any teen will agree to skip school, no matter the cause. But every grown-up knows that far fewer teens would spend their free time protesting than school time.
Fact is, teenagers should be learning how to be adults and learning adult skills — not just mimicking actions of the adults in their orbit to gain their approval.
I believe climate change is real and we must deal with it. I teach my children to be good stewards of the environment. But that’s separate from allowing them to be exploited for political goals — even if I happen to agree with the mission.
Sticking kids with the job of solving climate change or even just using them as puppets is deeply inappropriate.
De Blasio tweeted: “New York City stands with our young people. They’re our conscience.” Maybe adults should have their own conscience.
SOURCE
NBC News Wants You to Confess Your Climate Sins
Do you ever get the feeling that climate change is a cult? Does it ever seem like its adherents are immune to reason as they vindictively lash out at anyone who questions their beliefs? Wouldn't it be nice if they just left you alone and let you live your life?
Well, too bad. You live in 2019 and you use modern technology and conveniences. You eat food that actually tastes good. You're guilty and you need to confess. Repent, sinner!
That's right, NBC "News" has put up a page for what they're literally calling Climate Confessions.
"Even those who care deeply about the planet's future can slip up now and then. Tell us: Where do you fall short in preventing climate change? Do you blast the A/C? Throw out half your lunch? Grill a steak every week? Share your anonymous confession with NBC News."
Bless me, Gaia, for I have sinned.
Apparently, there are all sorts of ways you can sin against the planet. NBC breaks it down into six categories
I submitted my own confession: "I work in an air-conditioned newsroom at NBC." They haven't published it yet, but I feel better already.
Hat tip to Mark Hemingway, who notes: "This from NBC News is amazing. Climate change is some kind of religion -- all eschatology, minus the redemption." In other words, you're always guilty but you can never be saved.
SOURCE
Wind Power Sources Remain More Fantasy than Reality
At first glance, wind power seems to be the path to a carbon-free energy future. Once harnessed, it’s clean and abundant. Larger turbines have enhanced wind’s power-generating capacity.
But contrary to its supporters, wind energy has grown thanks largely to production tax credits (2.3 cents per kilowatt hour) totaling billions of dollars. However, those credits are being phased out, and without such generous subsidies, wind energy will not make much of a dent in power production or carbon mitigation for at least a decade.
The amount of wind energy has tripled in the past 10 years, growing to 97,223 megawatts in 41 states. Half of that generating capacity is located in five of them: Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, California and Kansas. Because seasonal wind patterns vary considerably across the country, wind’s contribution to the grid represents just 8 percent of power production nationwide.
Despite all the hoopla over wind energy, the nation’s only offshore wind turbines are located in coastal waters near Rhode Island. The Block Island Wind Farm, which went into operation in late 2016, cost $2 billion, plus $16.7 million to compensate companies that lost access to fishing grounds. Operating and maintenance expenses for wind farms currently add about $48,000 per megawatt generated.
Massachusetts likewise is preparing to obtain power from more than a score of huge wind turbines off its coast, carried to the mainland by underwater cables, with the cost passed through to households and businesses.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, offshore wind energy is “very, very expensive,” costing 2.6 times more than onshore wind power and 3.4 times more than power produced by a natural gas combined-cycle plant. Of course, the cost of wind farms surely will fall as more are built, and perhaps ways will be found to reduce the dangers wind turbines pose to birds, bats, and other wildlife.
In the meantime, if we are serious about reducing energy costs and carbon emissions, we need to be realistic about the limitations of power generated by the wind and other renewables.
A more practical environmental approach is to expand the use of the combined-cycle natural gas plants, which have smaller carbon footprints than coal plants and have reduced such emissions to levels not seen since the early 1990s. The shale revolution has made that possible, greatly strengthening economic incentives to substitute natural gas for coal in power production. Nowadays, data analytics and complex algorithms make it easier to find natural gas and boost the productivity of shale fields.
The surge in America’s natural-gas production also helps to reduce carbon emissions in other countries. Exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) are projected to double by the end of this year. Asian countries that still rely heavily on coal are the largest purchasers of American LNG, using the clean-burning fuel to improve their air quality.
Shale has been the single biggest addition to the nation’s energy supply in many decades. Renewables at the moment offer more promise than reality. Even with lavish subsidies, wind and solar power together account for slightly more than 10 percent of the nation’s electricity. In contrast, gas provides nearly 35 percent; it is indispensable for generating backup power on days when the wind doesn’t blow, or the sun doesn’t shine.
Because of rising electricity demands and the retirement of coal and nuclear plants, many states are planning for more wind-powered electricity production. Under present regulatory regimes, most of the capital and operating costs of new wind farms will end up being added to consumers’ utility bills. So, too, in some states are “the stranded costs” of mothballed power plants.
Unsubsidized wind energy simply is too expensive to become a major source of electricity in most states. (In 2016, wind represented just seven-tenths of 1 percent of Massachusetts’s power production.) The inability of grid operators to manage the variations in power from wind and solar energy is creating new headaches.
Americans need a reliable supply of affordable electricity. But if too much weight is placed on wind and solar systems and not enough on conventional power plants, the result will be far too little electricity, with potentially grievous economic consequences.
SOURCE
Renewable Energy Will Only Be Possible With Massive Increases in the Supply of Critical Minerals
The recent threats by Beijing to cut off American access to critical mineral imports has many Americans wondering why our politicians have allowed the United States to become so overly dependent on China for these valued resources in the first place.
Today, the United States is 90% dependent on China and Russia for many vital “rare earth minerals.”
The main reason for our overreliance on nations like China for these minerals is not that we are running out of these resources here at home. The U.S. Mining Association estimates that we have at least $5 trillion of recoverable mineral resources.
The U.S. Geological Survey reports that we still have up to 86% or more of key mineral resources like copper and zinc remaining in the ground, waiting to be mined. These resources aren’t on environmentally sensitive lands, like national parks, but on the millions of acres of federal, state and private lands.
The mining isn’t happening because of extremely prohibitive environmental rules and a permitting process that can take five to 10 years to open a new mine. Green groups simply resist almost all new drilling.
What they may not realize is that the de facto mining prohibitions jeopardize the “green energy revolution” that liberals are so desperately seeking.
How’s this for rich irony?: Making renewable energy at all technologically plausible will require massive increases in the supply of rare earth and critical minerals. Without these valuable metals, there will not be more efficient 21st-century batteries for electric cars or modern solar panels. Kiss the Green New Deal and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ utopian vision of 100% renewable energy goodbye.
Yet, for decades now, environmentalists have erected every possible barrier to mining here in America for critical minerals — which we have in great abundance.
Search far and wide through the grandiose Green New Deal plans and you will not find any call for additional domestic mining for battery-operated electric vehicles and electrified mass transportation systems, nor the underlying energy infrastructure.
Thanks to the extreme environmentalists, we import from unfriendly and repressive governments the critical minerals needed to produce rechargeable batteries (lithium and cobalt), wind turbine motors (dysprosium), thin films for solar power (tellurium) and miniature sensors that manage the performance of electric vehicles (yttrium).
Another irony in the left’s anti-mining crusade is that these same groups have long boasted that by eliminating our need for fossil fuels, America won’t rely on cartels like OPEC that have in the past held our nation hostage to wild price swings and embargoes. Greens also complain that fossil fuel dependence requires a multibillion-dollar military presence in the Middle East and around the world to ensure supply. Now we can substitute OPEC with China and Russia.
Here is one simple but telling example of the shortsightedness of the “no mining” position of the environmentalists. Current electric vehicles can use up to 10 times more copper than fossil fuel vehicles. Then, additional copper wire networks will be needed to attach convenient battery chargers throughout public spaces and along roads and highways. Do we really want this entire transportation infrastructure to be dependent on China and Russia?
Of course, it is not just green energy development that will be imperiled by our mining restrictions folly. Innovation and research on new lightweight metals and alloys, such as those used in lifesaving medical devices and tiny cameras in smartphones, could also become stalled if foreign prices rise prohibitively.
Also, because our mining laws — the ones that don’t outright prohibit mining — protect the environment far more than those in nations like China and Africa, by importing these minerals, we are contributing to global environmental degradation.
So, there you have it. The keep-it-in-the-ground movement environmentalists demand against use of almost all of America’s bountiful energy and mineral resources is blocking a green future and a safer planet. Do they know this? Do they care?
SOURCE
‘Blood on his hands’: Australian PM urged to intervene after Queensland Government loses bid to continue shark culling
Greenies much prefer sharks to people
Queensland’s tourism minister says Prime Minister Scott Morrison could have “blood on his hands” if he doesn’t intervene on a ban preventing shark culling on the Great Barrier Reef.
The Queensland Government yesterday lost an appeal in the Federal Court for the right to use drum lines to catch and kill sharks on the reef in a bid to protect swimmers.
The appeal came after the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in April upheld a Humane Society challenge to the State Government program in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park area.
Queensland Agriculture Minister Mark Furner wants the Federal Government to change federal legislation to allow the program to continue in the park.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which manages the area, was created by federal legislation in 1975.
Tourism Minister Kate Jones said the court decision left her deeply concerned for the safety of visitors swimming in the World Heritage area.
“I’m calling on the Prime Minister to intervene,” she told reporters. “I’m sure the Prime Minister does not want to have blood on his hands through this decision in relation to the federal act.”
However, Humane Society campaigner Lawrence Chlebeck says the court decision is a victory for sharks. “No longer will sharks senselessly die for a misguided sense of security,” he said.
In its decision, the tribunal said the scientific evidence about “the lethal component” of the shark control program “overwhelmingly” showed it does not reduce the risk of an unprovoked shark attack.
The program now has to be carried out in a way that avoids killing sharks to the “greatest extent possible”. The park will only be permitted to authorise the euthanasia of sharks caught on drum lines on animal welfare grounds.
All tiger, bull and white sharks caught on drum lines are now to be tagged before being released. Additionally, sharks caught on drum lines are to be attended to as soon as possible — preferably within 24 hours of capture — and tagged sharks are to be relocated offshore.
Mr Chlebeck wants the Government to stop shark culls along the entire Queensland coastline.
There have been no changes to the shark control program in other Queensland locations, including the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast.
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 September, 2019
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims climate change is behind illegal immigration crisis on the southern border
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has claimed climate change is behind the immigration crisis on the southern border and that 'walling ourselves off' isn't a long term answer.
The New York Democrat, 29, said it was time to recognize 'climate refugees in our immigration policies'.
On Monday the freshman lawmaker tweeted: 'Remember when we said climate change would cause mass migration, & the right called us crazy?
'Well, it's happening. And walling ourselves off from the world isn't a plan for our future. It's time to recognize climate refugees in our immigration policies.'
Ocasio-Cortez shared a link to an article in her tweet, which was retweeted almost 12,000 times, which claimed millions of people had been displaced this year.
The report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) revealed that in the first six months of 2019 more than seven million people had to leave their homes because of natural disasters including floods and tornadoes, reports the Mic.
Ocasio-Cortez also spoke out about climate change and urged people to consider it as a 'major factor fueling global migration' in April.
She tweeted: 'The far-right loves to drum up fear & resistance to immigrants. 'But have you ever noticed they never talk about what's causing people to flee their homes in the first place? Perhaps that's bc they'd be forced to confront 1 major factor fueling global migration: Climate change.'
Last week the New York representative predicted that Miami would not exist 'in a few years' if the Green New Deal is not passed.
Speaking at the NAACP forum she said: 'What is not realistic is not responding with a solution on the scale of the crisis — because what's not realistic is Miami not existing in a few years.'
Ocasio-Cortez reiterated that we need to be 'realistic' about the problem and make changes immediately.
She revealed the Green New Deal proposal in February, which focused on changing the economy, renewable energy alternatives and resource efficiency.
At the time she was critiqued over the draft legislation, which included an FAQ section that encouraged ending air travel and meat production.
The politicians comments yesterday follow her endorsing Democratic Sen. Ed Markey for re-election in Massachusetts.
In a video released by Markey's campaign she said she is backing the Democratic incumbent as one of the Senate's 'strongest progressives' and her partner on the Green New Deal climate change proposal.
'When I first got to Congress and we started to discuss big, bold plans - a solution on the scale of the crisis - many members shied away,' said Ocasio-Cortez. 'Ed Markey was one of the few people that had the courage to stand up and take a chance.'
Markey said: 'Climate change is the existential threat of our time, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the kind of generational leader we need to make the bold goals of the Green New Deal a reality'.
Known by her initials AOC, the liberal newcomer toppled a House Democratic leader with a remarkable 2018 primary challenge that stunned Washington.
A group aligned with Ocasio-Cortez, Justice Democrats, has already announced its support for primary challenges to other congressional Democrats in 2020.
However Ocasio-Cortez has become a top villain for Republicans, who are running campaign ads featuring her as the face of the Democratic party and its leftward lean.
They call her 'socialist' for her health care and climate change proposals. In a controversial ad that aired during the Democratic presidential primary debate this week depicted Ocasio-Cortez, alongside imagery of genocide, as the 'face of socialism.'
Ocasio-Cortez is heading to Colorado next week to headline a fundraising dinner for Democrats and participate in activities around the climate strike protests.
These are a series of worldwide walkout of young people from schools, homes, jobs to demand action on climate change.
SOURCE
AOC’s Miami hype
The latest from AOC is her warning to the residents of Miami and the state of Florida writ large who are on the front lines of the imminent climate change catastrophe, as she describes.
At an NAACP event on September 11th, of all dates, she said: “When it comes to climate change, what is not realistic is not responding …with a solution on the scale of the crisis. Because what is not realistic is Miami not existing in a few years.”
Assume for a moment that AOC’s prediction was real, that Miami will be flooded from rising oceans due to melted arctic glaciers from global warming from carbon emissions in “a few years.” Would her proposed Green New Deal prevent it? Could anything we do prevent it?
For the sake of their stated profession, has a single soft-ball “journalist” who agrees with AOC ever asked her to defend her claims about the imminent climate catastrophe for the planet?
Has anyone asked AOC if carbon emissions alone affect the planet’s temperature, or are there other factors, such as sunspot activity and ocean currents? I doubt even AOC would pretend we could impact sunspots and El Niño, but would curbing carbon emissions alone be enough?
If polar ice caps in Greenland and elsewhere are literally melting in such catastrophic amounts enough to soon flood Miami, as she claims, how would a change in temperature of two or three degrees alter that?
AOC and nearly every Democratic presidential candidate are demanding we change our lifestyles and conveniences by changing our diets and automobiles. They demand that we eliminate jobs in the energy sector, and pay more in taxes and energy costs. Yet rarely are any of them asked to provide scientific detail why any of this is warranted.
Not one of these public figures proposing to alter our lives and society is leading by example. They are driving large SUVs, flying in private jets, owning multiple homes, and dining in fancy restaurants. This was on flagrant display at the recent climate summit in Sicily, hosted by Google, and is true of every major politician demanding societal changes in the name of fighting the climate.
One of my favorite ongoing examples is presidential candidate Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, who has been polling steadily near zero. He obsesses about climate change and demands policies ranging from banning red meat to retrofitting commercial buildings. But he won’t use the exercise equipment at Gracie Mansion in Manhattan which is the free home provided for the mayor. Instead, he is driven round-trip in his gas-guzzling platoon of SUVs over the East River to his favorite Brooklyn gym for his daily workout. He remains impervious to the hypocrisy of such a routine.
Fortunately, for now, most Americans are onto the act, and are not buying what climate alarmists are selling. Lots of people in the abstract believe in some man-made effect on the climate, but not enough to care in terms of changing their own habits and lifestyles, including the climate alarmists.
Last month a Gallup survey found just 3 percent of Americans believed “environment/pollution/climate change” was the most important problem facing the country; and this collective category came in 9th on the list of non-economic issues. With all three issues lumped together, “climate change” alone would rank further down the list of concerns.
If the existence of Miami were really in jeopardy in “a few years,” would not more Americans rank climate change the most important problem?
The 1 or 2 percent of Americans who view the climate as the most important issue facing the country were no doubt represented in the audience for the CNN “town hall” on climate change held recently. Several of the questioners were young and animated (rude, actually) about the issue. How many of them used mass transit, eschewed their high-energy computers or cell phones in the previous 24 hours, or spurned plastic bottled water and drank from the faucet?
Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute recently said it well:
"The cardinal rule when it comes to environmental virtue-signaling is that people give up what they’re willing to give up. Young people are no different. If being environmentally sound required sacrificing anything that a self-described environmental warrior actually valued, the conversation would quickly change to a different topic. One’s own habits are necessary; it’s everyone else’s that need to change."
Which brings us back to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This human news magnet will no doubt continue her Chicken Little act on climate; whether it’s speaking at events, or sharing her thoughts of the moment on Instagram from her kitchen stove. Fortunately, it appears most Americans are more entertained rather than agreeing, much less acting on her vacuous admonitions.
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GMO's Are Not the Problem. They're the Answer!
By Rich Kozlovich
On September 13, 2019 Cameron English posted the article, GMO, CRISPR-edited crops can cut pesticide use—if environmental activists do not block them saying:
In 2017, University of Florida plant geneticists Zhonglin Mou and Kevin Folta, along with their team of graduate students, announced a new method to fight common diseases in fruit plants. Their discovery could drastically reduce the use of fungicides if widely implemented by growers.
Unfortunately, their methods may never be put to use thanks to the controversy surrounding crop biotechnology.
The research confirms a point that cannot be stressed enough: scientists continue to make agriculture safer and more sustainable with the tools of modern genetics, but activists have waged such an effective scare campaign against crop biotechnology that it often remains unused by industry.
Luddite urban dwellers only consume, they don't produce, so they not only don't realize just how important this is, they don't want to know since environmentalism has become the neo-pagan religion of the urban atheist.
In their worship of the planet they self-righteously believe they're morally superior to the rest of us in their "all natural" views. It would be nice if they had to take responsibility for the consequences in human suffering they're "all natural" views produced in preventing these major crop engineering advances.
Genetic engineering advances that would have brought Golden Rice to the dinner tables of those in Southeast Asia, whose diet lacks sufficient Vitamin A because rice is the primary carbohydrate source in this area of the world, and as The Golden Rice Project notes:
Rice does not contain any ?-carotene (provitamin A), which their body could then convert into vitamin A. Dependence on rice as the predominant food source, therefore, necessarily leads to VAD, most severely affecting small children and pregnant women. In 2012 the World Health Organization reported that about 250 million preschool children are affected by VAD, and that providing those children with vitamin A could prevent about a third of all under-five deaths, which amounts to up to 2.7 million children that could be saved from dying unnecessarily. "
Marc Brazeau in his March 5, 2019 article Golden Rice is coming. Finally! Will it be the game-changer hinted at for almost 20 years? saying:
Comes the news that the government of Bangladesh is about to approve Golden Rice for commercial release some time in the next three months.
First and foremost this is fantastic news for Southeast Asia for humanitarian and economic development reasons. On a less consequential level this is great news for the overall debate surrounding the use of biotech in agriculture. Golden Rice occupied a space in the debate as the Great Golden Hope of Biotech Crops, a wholly virtuous crop devoid of the grubby commercial concerns of intellectual property or profit motive.
In this case, the IP had been donated, the rice was being developed by a non-profit NGO and the rice will be given freely to farmers and local breeding programs—a trait of value directly to consumers, among them some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. Because of this history, it is a crop not linked to so-called ‘industrial agriculture’ and its key trait is not tied to pesticide use.
Let's try to get this once and for all. Activists are constantly touting the idea what they do "is for the children". That's a logical fallacy known as the appeal to emotion fallacy, and when someone uses it you need to start looking very closely at what they're really promoting. Because what these activists have done isn't "for" the children, what they've done has been "to" the children. From DDT to GMO's the green movement is now, and has always been, foundationally misanthropic.
For twenty years this has been going on. That means if we take the number 2.7 million at face value that comes to 54 million children whose lives would have been saved. And untold millions more would have been saved from other afflictions as a result of Vitamin A deficiency.
I would like for everyone to think about this. If GMO techniques become common place here's what would happen. Agriculture would be able to produce food in an abundance that was never dreamt of. It would be done with less land use, allowing for animal protection, less pesticides, less labor, less cost and in some cases less water would be needed, all of which makes agriculture amazingly "sustainable". Isn't what they claim they want? Isn't "sustainability" their ultimate goal? Yet, these "all natural", "anti-pesticide", "sustainability" advocate Luddites are against it. Why?
Because they're not really against pesticides, land use, water use or GMO's, and they don't really care about "sustainability". What they're against is humanity.
The radicals among these activists think humanity is a plague on the planet that needs to be eradicated. The "moderates" only want to eliminate between four and six billion people.
SOURCE
How do you throw away a dead wind turbine?
Contrary to popular opinion, the life cycle of a modern wind turbine is no more than 20 to 25 years. Since turbine blades cannot be burned and are not recyclable, the recommended option is landfill disposal. But not every landfill can even accept these massive structures, even after they are broken into their parts.
According to Pu Liu and Claire Barlow (Waste Management, April 2017), there will be 43 million metric tons of blade waste worldwide by 2050, with China possessing 40% of the waste, Europe 25%, the United States 16%, and the rest of the world 19%. The problem of blade disposal, they conclude, is just beginning to emerge as a significant factor for the future.
A 2017 report from researchers Katerin Ramirez-Tejeda, David A. Turcotte, and Sarah Pike (New Solutions) asserts that “the environmental consequences and health risks are so adverse that the authors warn that if the public learns of this rapidly burgeoning problem, they may be less inclined to favor wind power expansion.”
Ramirez-Tejeda, et al., added that landfilling turbine waste is especially problematic “because its high resistance to heat, sunlight, and moisture means that it will take hundreds of years to degrade in a landfill environment. The wood and other organic material present in the blades would also end up in landfills, potentially releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and other volatile organic compounds to the environment.”
At current U.S. landfilling costs of about $60 per ton, the 40-ton monsters may provide short-term revenues for landfill operators. The long-term cost (including for pretreatment and transportation), together with community opposition to landfill expansion) is making turbine blade disposal a major emerging problem in the U.S. and worldwide.
Evidence of these difficulties is already emerging in the American heartland. The City of Casper, Wyoming, in July finally released a statement confirming the disposal of wind turbine blades in the Casper Regional Solid Waste Facility. The city says the facility has been accepting fiberglass wind turbine blades, that are being replaced, for disposal.
City officials justified their actions, stating that, “Destroying the blades requires compacting equipment more powerful and larger than the Casper Regional Solid Waste Facility has. Disposal in a landfill is a viable option as fiberglass is a material that does not leach components into the soil or groundwater and thus can be buried in an unlined landfill.”
City Manager Carter Napier commented, “The citizens of Casper can be satisfied in knowing that years of planning and proactive development pays off with projects of this nature.” Napier assured citizens that, “the revenue that is received from this project will ultimately benefit our entire community.”
City officials further explained that the Casper Regional Solid Waste Facility is the only landfill in the region that has both the national certifications required by the federal government to dispose of materials in an environmentally friendly manner and an unlined landfill large enough to handle the project.
Meanwhile, in Sioux Falls, Iowa, city officials have announced that Iowa wind farm operators brought 101 old turbine blades to the city dump this summer. However, City Hall promised it would not take any more turbine blades unless their owners take more steps to make the massive fiberglass pieces less space consuming.
The reason, according to Public Works Director Mark Cotter: “We can’t take any more unless they process them before bringing them to us. We’re using too many resources unloading them, driving over them a couple times, and working them into the ground.” Landfill crews, upon receiving each of the 120-foot-long blades (broken into three sections), crush the hollowed-out structures beneath the weight of 60-ton trucks.
In the future, city officials have determined, wind energy companies must break blades into pieces no larger than 3 feet long – through a grinding or shearing process. Sioux Falls is also planning a pilot study to determine the feasibility of sheering blades on site, the impact on air space at the landfill, and if pricing for accepting them [currently $64 per ton] should be changed.
Ultimately, according to Sarah Lozanova (Earth911, August 2017), decommissioning wind farms might be more costly than the construction phase. Indeed, she added, decommissioning and recycling wind turbines is a blind spot when considering the total environmental impact of wind energy.
Casper and Sioux Falls landfill operators are on the front lines of this massive emerging problem. Casper claims positive revenues, but Sioux Falls says they are losing money. One thing is certain: The costs and hassle (and waste of limited landfill space) of disposing of millions of tons of turbine blades must be factored into the cost-benefit for any wind project.
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Australia: Facts on fires forgotten in rush to blame climate change
Bushfires in Queensland and New South Wales dominated the news last week — and much of the media was quick to amplify claims climate change was at play.
Here’s retired NSW fire commissioner and former NSW climate change councillor Greg Mullins on ABC regional radio: “There are fires breaking out in places where they just shouldn’t burn. The west coast of Tasmania, the world heritage areas, subtropical rainforests, it’s all burning. And this is driven by climate change, there’s no other explanation.”
Well, he’s an expert, he’s worth reporting. But shouldn’t such claims be tested? He cited places burning that shouldn’t burn, such as Siberia where other sources confirm bushfires happen there every summer.
And Mullins mentioned the west coast of Tasmania. We saw fires there earlier this year and on this program we exposed emotive reporting suggesting this was unprecedented. It wasn’t, of course.
This report, for instance, in the South Australian Chronicle of February 1915 reported lives lost and the “most devastating bushfires ever known in Tasmania sweeping over the northwest coast and other districts. The extent of the devastation cannot be over-estimated.”
And as for Mullins’ claims on rainforests of the west coast, there was this report in 1982 from The Canberra Times, detailing a “huge forest fire” burning out 75,000 hectares of dense rainforest.
Nine newspapers’ Jane Caro tweeted her surprise at the fires: “So there are bushfires all the way up the NSW & Queensland coasts and no rain forecast for 6 to 8 weeks — in September!” she exclaimed, saying this was with one degree of warming and spruiking the climate action strike this Friday.
Yep, that’ll do it.
Back in the 1940s there were September days in Brisbane of 90 degrees fahrenheit, or over 32 degrees Celsius. Now sure, last week’s conditions were horrid, and not the norm. But they are not unprecedented. Drought, dry winters, hot springs, we get them. They might fit into a global warming narrative and they might not.
The best thing to do last week, surely, was to fight the fires. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott did — but I don’t know about the social media alarmists.
Channel 10 news reporter Alex Bruce-Smith wrote the fires were “unprecedented.” “There’s no beating around the bush,” she said, “climate change is helping drive the catastrophe we are currently seeing … it’s the worst start to a Queensland bushfire season on record.”
But is it?
To be fair to the journalists, this stuff was being put out there by people in authority. Andrew Sturgess of Queensland Fire and Emergency Services said: “It is a historic event. We have never seen fire danger indices, fire danger ratings at this time of the year, as we are seeing now. We have never seen this before in recorded history.”
Never before in recorded history? The Chronicle in the late winter of 1946, August 22, noted: “From Bundaberg to the New South Wales border”, “hundreds of square miles of drought stricken southeastern Queensland were aflame …”
Two years later on September 30, 1948, the Central Queensland Herald reported: “An 800-mile chain of bushfires fed by dry grass stretched tonight along the Queensland coast from Cairns to Maryborough.”
Both these easily-retrievable examples put the claims of “worst ever” and “unprecedented” into perspective, if not in the shade.
Perhaps the media ought to be more careful about such descriptors, or check them, or try for some perspective rather than just going with the zeitgeist.
Last week, The Guardian linked bushfires in Queensland rainforests to global warming. “I never thought I’d see the Australian rainforest burning. What will it take for us to wake up to the climate crisis?” That was written by Dr Joëlle Gergis of the ANU’s Climate Change Institute and member of the Climate Council.
“Despite being ridiculously busy, I couldn’t turn down this opportunity to share my thoughts on the current bushfires,” she tweeted. “As a scientist, what I find particularly disturbing about the current conditions is that world heritage rainforest areas such as the Lamington National Park in the Gold Coast hinterland are now burning,” she wrote.
Well, we were busy too but were able to dig this out. It’s the Cairns Post from October 25, 1951. “A bushfire in Lamington National Park today swept through a grove of 3000-year-old Macrozamia palms. These trees were one of the features of the park. The fire has burnt out about 2000 acres of thick rainforest country.”
That’s right, nearly 70 years ago, rainforest burning in Lamington National Park, before global warming.
Journalists were quick to share the alarmist views. Hey, it’s easier than checking them.
Seemingly forgotten in the rush to fit up climate change as the cause of these fires was one highly relevant fact. Arsonists were responsible for many, if not most of the blazes.
As news.com.au reported last Wednesday” “Detectives have already established that ten fires — in Brisbane, Stanthorpe, the southeast and central Queensland regions — were deliberately lit. Eight of those were set by juveniles.”
Unless climate change is changing juvenile behaviour, it is hard to overlook crucial facts, such as how the fires actually started.
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18 September, 2019
UK: Parents told not to terrify children over climate change as rising numbers treated for 'eco-anxiety'
Rising numbers of children are being treated for “eco-anxiety”, experts have said, as they warn parents against “terrifying” their youngsters with talk of climate catastrophe.
Protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, the recent fires in the Amazon and apocalyptic warnings by the teenage activist Greta Thunberg have prompted a “tsunami” of young people seeking help.
A group of psychologists working with the University of Bath says it is receiving a growing volume of enquiries from teachers, doctors and therapists unable to cope.
The Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) told The Daily Telegraph some children complaining of eco-anxiety have even been given psychiatric drugs.
The body is campaigning for anxiety specifically caused by fear for the future of the planet to be recognised as a psychological phenomenon.
However, they do not want it classed as a mental illness because, unlike standard anxiety, the cause of the worry is “rational”.
“A lot of parents are coming into therapy asking for help with the children and it has escalated a lot this summer,” said Caroline Hickman, a teaching fellow at Bath and a CPA executive.
“The symptoms are the same [as clinical anxiety], the feelings are the same, but the cause is different. “The fear is of environmental doom - that we’re all going to die.”
Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg rose to global fame this year as she supported the protests by Extinction Rebellion, which brought parts of central London to a standstill.
Thurnberg argues that the EU must cut its carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2030 to avoid an existential crisis - double the target set by the Paris Accord - while Extinction Rebellion demands the UK achieve net-zero emissions by 2025.
The G7 summit in Biarritz last month was also dominated by a row between France and Brazil over the Amazon fires after President Macron said the Earth’s “lungs” were burning. Ms Hickman said parents should talk to their children about global warming but should not say mankind is doomed.
“Parents need to find some words to talk about it that is age-appropriate and not terrifying,” she said.
“You need to separate what is fact from what is unknown: tell them some species are going extinct and some humans are being harmed, but don’t say we’re all going to die, because that isn’t true.”
“What you don’t want is that child to collapse in a well of depression saying “what’s the point in going to university”, or “what’s the point of doing my exams”, which I have heard children say.”
The CPA recommends a four-stage approach to explaining responsibly climate change to children without scaring them.
Parents should first gradually introduce them to the known facts, then ask them how they feel, before acknowledging that the ultimate outcome is uncertain.
Finally, parents should agree practical steps to make a difference, such as by cutting down on non-recyclable waste and choosing food with a better climate footprint.
Eco-anxiety is steadily gaining recognition in the academic community. In 2017 a report by the American Psychological Association produced a report recognising its impact and calling for dedicated research into the mental health consequences of climate change.
SOURCE
California experience raises the caution flag on ‘green jobs’
California’s mixed record of using public investments and environmental mandates to create “green jobs” raises serious questions about the promises of some Democratic presidential candidates to use economy-transforming investments in environmentally friendly technologies to put millions of people to work.
Many of the initiatives touted by the candidates in their environmental plans are already in place in California, and some of them having been promoted as important engines of job creation. But California stopped counting green jobs in 2013, struggling to separate truly new jobs from existing employment growth.
As California's experience shows, reality doesn't always live up to projections. And while some of the most conservative estimates, like Warren's and Steyer's, appear reasonable based on California’s record, the state’s experience also reveals just how modest — and unimpressive — those goals would be for a 10-year period.
Most of the proposals being floated by candidates have analogues in California, which is now a decade into its quest to prove that economic growth and greenhouse gases are not inextricably linked. Where Biden wants to install 500,000 electric vehicle charging outlets by 2030, California has a target of 250,000 by 2025. Where Washington Gov. Jay Inslee had wanted to make new buildings zero-carbon by 2030, California has net-zero energy efficiency standards that require solar panels on all new homes. Where Warren proposes a National Institute of Clean Energy to fund cutting-edge research, California has its state Energy Commission, which spends some $250 million per year on grants and incentives for everything from batteries to hydrogen stations to electric school buses. Warren, Steyer and O'Rourke's "buy clean" requirements for the federal government match California's 2017 law requiring public projects to use low-emission steel, glass and insulation.
California’s experience is that jobs have materialized, but that it's been more trouble than it's worth to count them in the aggregate. While "green jobs" were the common argot in 2009, when Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act injected $790 billion into the economy, the term has fallen out of favor since — as has calculating its number.
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped tabulating green jobs in 2013, as did California’s Employment Development Department after it found "no discernible evidence that green firms were more likely to create jobs than non-green firms." A 2008 California law required the creation of a "green-collar jobs council" and annual reports to the legislature, but they dropped off in 2010.
"'Green jobs' is a strange and somewhat elusive category," said University of California, Davis economist Dave Rapson.
That's partly because the term encompasses many existing jobs, so it doesn't reflect the job creation goal that politicians are after. "The green job classification hasn't been particularly useful because the work is distributed among so many traditional industries," said Betony Jones, an adviser to government agencies and nonprofits on labor issues who used to work at the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center, which has done some of the most detailed thinking on the amorphous sector. "Where do you draw the line? Do you count recycling jobs but not garbage pickup jobs, and it's the same person?"
Some private groups have been the keepers of the green jobs flame. Over the 6-year period from 2013 to 2018, "advanced clean energy," including energy storage, hydropower, solar, nuclear, ethanol, alternatively fueled vehicles and building efficiency, added 130,350 jobs, according to figures compiled by a Steyer-funded think tank, Advanced Energy Economy. That's about 6.4 percent of California's total non-farm job growth of just over 2 million jobs.
Warren’s plan to create 1.2 million jobs over 10 years would add an average of 120,000 jobs per year, or about 5 percent of the U.S.'s annual job growth from 2013-2018. It would also lift GDP by 0.1 percent per year above a baseline assumption of 2.04 percent annual growth, according to an analysis of the plan the Warren campaign commissioned from Moody's. Steyer's plan to create 1 million jobs would add 100,000 jobs per year. While that's comparable to California's results, it's not exactly the economic "transformation" that Steyer touts.
"A million additional jobs over 10 years, that's not a very large number," said Rob Williams, an environmental economist at the University of Maryland and a university fellow with the think tank Resources For the Future who published a working paper earlier this month, which found job creation estimates are not a good rationale for making environmental policy decisions. "The natural amount of jobs created and destroyed every year are just enormously larger than that."
Larger estimates, like Inslee's and Sanders', likely don't reflect net job losses and gains from such labor market shifts, but focus just on the gains.
"In many cases, people are just trying to come up with the biggest number they can come up with," said Williams. "In many cases, what our modeling suggests is these are causing job shifts rather than net job creation. You create clean energy jobs, and you lose jobs in older industries."
Warren's plan, at least, has accounted for that. It assumes the oil and gas industry will lose 160,000 jobs over 10 years, according to Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi.
Sanders' 20 million figure doesn't include losses, according to the University of Vermont ecological economist who did the analysis, Jon Erickson. But he pointed out that Sanders' plan would help workers affected by ongoing declines.
"The economy is hemorrhaging jobs in the coal sector," he said, citing a nationwide decline in coal mining employment over the past 40 years from 250,000 jobs to 50,000 today. "Kentucky today has fewer coal jobs than it did when Trump took office. It's just heading that way, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to turn things around."
His analysis estimates 1.5 million jobs would be created in the wind industry and 3 million in home energy efficiency and weatherization.
"Certainly many of those jobs, you can be thinking of them as transition jobs that would replace losses that are already happening in other industries," Erickson said. "Rather than just let this naturally happen by market forces, the Green New Deal actually helps pay for the economic transition from a fossil fueled economy to a renewable energy fueled economy."
Overall, though, economists don't subscribe to theories of massive job creation. "The sort of standard economist take on all of this is pretty skeptical," said James Bushnell, another UC Davis economist. "Unless you're in a recession, creating jobs in one sector usually comes at the expense of reduced jobs in another sector." Indeed, California's oil and gas sector shrank by about 6,000 jobs from 2013-18, going from 21,000 to 15,000 jobs, according to state data.
At the least, California's forays into clean energy haven't dampened its juggernaut economy, which rebounded from the recession significantly faster than the national average. "What we know is California's economy has done very well, and we've invested a lot in clean energy," Bushnell said. "I don't know if we're at the point where we can point to causality there. I conclude from that that our investment in clean energy has not hurt the economy. I don't necessarily take it in the direction that it's stimulated growth."
One example that serves as an illustration of California's experience is an energy efficiency program that was put on the 2012 state ballot by none other than Steyer. While he is an outlier among presidential candidates in never having held public office, his decade of experience as the biggest self-appointed promoter of California’s energy policies is instructive.
"I think Steyer's probably the only one who knows what he's talking about who has experience with it," said Tom Dalzell, business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, the main union representing employees of the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric.
Steyer, who entered the presidential race in July but has already reached half of the polling levels required to qualify for the fall debates, cut his political teeth in California's clean energy world. He rose to prominence by defending the state's climate policies against a jobs argument at the peak of the recession, bankrolling the campaign against an oil company-sponsored ballot initiative in 2010 that would have suspended the state's greenhouse gas target until the unemployment rate — then at 12 percent — fell below 5.5 percent.
Coming off of that victory, he sponsored a 2012 initiative, Proposition 39, that closed a corporate tax loophole and devoted half of the proceeds to energy efficiency retrofits in schools. The Clean Energy Job Creation Fund, which handed out $1.5 billion through last year, provides a real-world comparison to national hypotheticals.
While Steyer argued at the time that it would create up to 40,000 jobs, the program has resulted in just 8,700 direct jobs, and 19,800 jobs in total including indirect jobs and increased economic activity, according to an analysis by the UC, Berkeley Labor Center.
Steyer's campaign said that the Prop. 39 job count reflected the fact that only half of the new spending went to schools. The other half went to the state's general fund, "where it goes to other state programs that create additional jobs," spokesperson Ben Gerdes said in an email. As for Steyer's current Climate Corps plan, it's only one part of his broader jobs plan, which will "create a regenerative economy for all Americans" through additional spending on infrastructure and clean energy standards, Gerdes said.
Prop. 39 also created fewer jobs than originally expected because the initiative ended up spending a larger share of funding on schools than envisioned. Efficiency retrofits at schools inherently produce fewer jobs than large, new construction projects, according to one of the key architects of the measure, which was written to give the legislature control over the purse strings.
"The key thing about jobs analysis is you cannot do them without knowing where the money's directed," said Kate Gordon, who served as head of energy and climate for the Steyer-founded think tank Center for the Next Generation and is now California Gov. Gavin Newsom's senior climate adviser, as well as director of the state's planning and research agency. "There was a faction of people who wanted it to be used for commercial real estate and new buildings and upgrades. Those projects create a lot of jobs."
Gordon also previously served as co-director of the Apollo Alliance, the group of environmentalists and labor unions that came up with a plan to spend $500 billion to create 5 million green jobs. That jobs number made it into Obama's 2008 presidential platform, but didn't fully materialize — despite the 2009 stimulus package -- because it also included a national clean energy standard and a national carbon price, neither of which came to pass, Gordon pointed out.
California has both of those policies. And the biggest single clean energy job engine for the state has indeed been its renewable energy requirements for utilities, which UC Berkeley researchers have credited with creating 52,000 "job-years" from 2003-2014. That's about 4,300 jobs per year on average, but is more heavily weighted toward the later years, when installations accelerated to about 10,000 jobs per year.
There's been no recent analysis of the number of jobs created from Californnia's cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, which has so far generated about $10 billion through the sale of emissions permits. But a quarter of the revenue has gone to the state's high-speed rail system, which last year trumpeted the creation of 2,000 construction jobs to date. A 2018 study estimated that the first four years of cap-and-trade proceeds — $2.2 billion — had created 19,700 jobs and an additional 55,900 jobs indirectly.
While the numbers aren't huge, the jobs are meaningful to the people who have them. "The Green New Deal says a bunch of things to a bunch of people and it means something different to everybody, but it was pretty strong about creating new work for union workers," Jones said. "And California has a pretty good track record on that."
California’s green-collar jobs council has since morphed into state training programs, which received $12 million in funding from Prop. 39 to train disadvantaged workers, including women, foster youth and formerly incarcerated people. The programs placed 1,721 people into jobs, out of 2,609 people trained. They're now getting funding from the cap-and-trade auctions, as well as the gas tax increase approved by lawmakers in 2017.
“We're going back to the old days of New Deal, big public investments and putting language in those investments,” said Tim Rainey, the executive director of the Workforce Development Board, which oversees the training programs.
The trainees are placed as apprentices in jobs being done by union members, including high-speed rail. A particular beneficiary is the Building and Construction Trades Council, which has been one of the most stalwart defenders of oil industry jobs.
The lesson California has learned is not to focus on big-picture numbers. "To the extent it's possible, it's really important to step away from the specific job number," Gordon said. "This is going to take a rethinking of the way we build infrastructure, buildings, transportation networks, grids, the way we do capital stock turnover of existing companies, infrastructure, everything."
But jobs are still a potent argument in the state legislature, where environmentalists are working to convince unions to stop lobbying against climate policies in favor of continued reliance on fossil fuels. Unions are a swing vote: Sometimes they side with environmentalists, as in their opposition to a bill this session, CA SB386 (19R), that would have let utilities count existing large-scale hydropower dams towards their renewable electricity requirements — with the attendant effect of reducing the need for new construction projects.
Other times, union workers ally with oil and gas companies, as they did to torpedo CA AB345 (19R), a bill this year that would have curbed oil production and jobs by establishing a 2,500-foot buffer zone between new oil and gas wells and homes, schools, hospitals and playgrounds.
Labor unions have also opposed a years-long effort by renewable energy companies and some environmental groups to coordinate California's electricity grid more closely with surrounding states, because it would enable renewable energy projects to move to right-to-work states. But IBEW 1245 agreed last year to shut down the state's last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, by 2025, and the union points to the labor agreements it secured as a potential example for how to transition away from fossil fuels. It's now working with other unions representing oil and gas workers to figure out a "just transition" for them.
On the national level, candidates are also envisioning "just transitions." Sanders' plan would create "millions of good-paying, unionized jobs" in steel and auto manufacturing, construction, energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms and renewable power plants. It would also guarantee fossil fuel workers' wages for up to five years and give them housing assistance, health care, pension support and either job placement or early retirement support.
But on the ground in California, Dalzell isn't optimistic about reaching a compromise with his fellow workers.
"Their on-the-ground reality is different than ours, and so they might have an approach some would consider to be 180 degrees out from ours," he said. "And then steelworkers who represent the refineries, they're very aggressive fighting anything about transportation efficiency, electrification of cars, and on other issues there are tensions."
Meanwhile, the jobs estimates will continue.
"Economists tend to be pretty skeptical that these effects are actually important, but they're clearly important for the politics, so there's this gap between the importance in the political world and the importance economists have paid to it,” Williams said.
SOURCE
EPA Touts ‘Accelerated’ Cleanup of Hazardous, Contaminated Sites
The Environmental Protection Agency has hit the acceleration button to clean up Superfund sites across the country on President Donald Trump’s watch, according to a new task force report detailing progress over the past two years.
The Superfund Task Force, commissioned in May 2017, developed a list of sites requiring the EPA’s “immediate and intense attention.” Formally known as the “Administrator’s Emphasis List,” EPA officials released it in December 2017, less than a year after Trump took office.
The new task force report spotlights the sprawling Tar Creek Superfund site as one of several where the government has made “substantial progress.”
Tar Creek includes thousands of acres of lead and zinc mining areas in northeast Oklahoma, southeast Kansas, and southwest Missouri. Because of the site’s “complexity and size,” the report says, a cleanup that goes back to 1984 will take several more years to complete.
The work includes “plugging” abandoned wells and excavating contaminated soil in Ottawa County, Oklahoma. State and federal officials first became aware of potential environmental hazards in 1979, when water began rising to the surface from underground mines.
The EPA has joined with the state of Oklahoma and the Quapaw tribe of Native Americans in a yearlong effort to formulate a “strategic plan” for Tar Creek after it was added to the agency’s Emphasis List. The strategic plan, which will be released later this month, assesses cleanup needs, risks, and economic potential for the site.
“The work of the Superfund Task Force over the past two years is paying dividends for communities nationwide, including those near the Tar Creek Superfund site,” Regional Administrator Ken McQueen said in a press release.
“EPA will continue working with our partners toward a cleanup that will benefit the surrounding communities,” McQueen said.
The full Superfund Task Force report, released earlier this month, is available here.
EPA officials say they will continue to update the Emphasis List on a quarterly basis.
Related: Trump’s EPA Outpaces Obama in Cleaning Up Hazardous Waste Sites
The Superfund program dates to 1980, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act. The legislation provides funds for cleaning up thousands of sites across the country laced with such contaminants as lead, asbestos, and dioxin-infused soil, as well as radiation.
Superfund sites include “manufacturing facilities, processing plants, landfills, and mining sites,” according to the EPA’s website.
Those sites with known or potential releases of “hazardous substances, pollutants, or contaminants” are placed on the agency’s National Priorities List.
In addition to its efforts aimed at what it calls expediting cleanup and remediation, the task force said it sought to reinvigorate “responsible party cleanup and reuse,” promote third-party private investment, boost redevelopment and revitalization among communities, and develop a strategy for stakeholder engagement. The EPA’s press release details how officials met some of these goals.
“Thanks to the hard work of EPA career officials, the Superfund Task Force has strengthened the program in numerous ways, from accelerating cleanups to promoting redevelopment to improving community engagement,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a written statement, adding:
The recommendations generated by the Task Force and applied by the Superfund program have directly improved the health and economic opportunity of thousands of people living near Superfund sites. We are taking concrete steps to ensure that the work of the Task Force continues to enhance the Superfund program moving forward.
The agency prepared an online storyboard highlighting the task force’s success stories across the country.
SOURCE
The case against fracking is based on ideology, not science
THE ENVIRONMENTAL CASE against fracking crumbled years ago. The economic case for it is unassailable. So why are leading Democratic presidential candidates intent on shutting down one of the most beneficial US innovations of the modern era?
Fracking — short for hydraulic fracturing — is the drilling method that launched an American energy renaissance. Though the technology isn't new, its application to formerly impenetrable underground rock formations has turned the United States into the world's leading producer of oil and natural gas. US energy independence, which as recently as a decade ago was a pie-in-the-sky slogan, is beginning to look realistic. Last November, the nation reached a singular milestone, exporting more oil and refined fuel than it imported. It was the first time since the early 1970s that America could claim the status of a net energy exporter. And all thanks to fracking.
At the same time — also thanks to fracking — America's carbon-dioxide emissions have plummeted.
By unleashing vast quantities of clean-burning natural gas, fracking dramatically changed the economics of electricity production. As natural gas grew more and more affordable, fewer and fewer power plants continued to burn coal. Indeed, more than half of all US coal-fired plants have closed over the past 10 years. According to the Energy Information Administration, 35 percent of America's electricity in 2018 came from natural gas; just 27 percent was from coal. No one would have thought those percentages were possible in 2000, when half of the nation's electricity was generated by coal-fired plants and less than one-sixth came from natural gas.
Because natural gas releases only half as much carbon dioxide as coal, the sweeping shift to gas-fueled plants has led to a dramatic reduction in America's greenhouse gas emissions. So dramatic, in fact, that no other nation matches it, as President Obama observed in his 2014 State of the Union address: "Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on Earth."
For anyone who worries about climate change and is intent on carbon reduction, all this should be cause for rejoicing. Fracking, which has made it possible, should be extolled as a boon to environmental progress.
Yet while many mainstream Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and former California Governor Jerry Brown, have expressed support for fracking, at least three of the party's leading presidential candidates — Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Kamala Harris of California — want to do away with it. Warren declares that on her first day as president, she would issue an executive order to "ban fracking — everywhere." Harris told CNN this month that "there's no question" that she opposes it. Sanders, for his part, came out against fracking in 2016.
It's hard to make sense of such blind hostility to the technology that has done more than any other to expand the supply of clean, affordable energy. The candidates' rejectionism clearly isn't grounded in science. Many fracking foes raise alarms about groundwater contamination. But when the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency exhaustively studied that issue, it reported that it could "not find evidence" that fracking was responsible for "systemic impacts on drinking water resources." Lisa Jackson, who headed the EPA during Obama's first term, told a congressional hearing in 2011 that she was "not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water."
Of course that isn't to say that fracking can never lead to problems. Like every technology or industrial process, it comes with costs as well as benefits. But that only means it should be carefully supervised and regulated, not banned outright. As it is, fracking is regulated by the states, though there are environmentalists who argue for stricter supervision. That's a position Warren/Sanders/Harris could adopt if their real interest was to craft a better energy policy. Their demand for a total end to fracking, however, is mere ideological posturing, unsupported by science.
To repeat, fracking has the support of many mainstream Democrats, some of whom actually are scientists. One of them is geologist John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado who recently quit the Democratic presidential race.
"Based on experience and science, I recognized that fracking was one of our very best and safest extraction techniques," Hickenlooper wrote in his 2016 memoir. "Fracking is good for the country's energy supply, our national security, our economy, and our environment."
A vow to "ban fracking — everywhere" may excite progressive extremists who hate the fossil-fuel industry and all its works. But it's the very opposite of a serious proposal, and the mark of a candidate unsuited for the White House.
SOURCE
Water storage in Australia at risk of falling behind population growth
There is no shortage of viable dam proposals but fanatical Greenie opposition derails most of them
The failure by governments of the largest states to build dams has placed water storage at risk of falling behind population growth.
An analysis revealed by Water Resources Minister David Littleproud has found that at current rates, water storage per person in NSW, Victoria and Queensland will fall by more than 30 per cent by 2030.
“The states have been responsible for urban water since federation and should be taking the lead,” Mr Littleproud said. “They’re just not keeping up with their growing populations.”
On a tour of the drought-hit Stanthorpe region in his electorate of Maranoa in southern Queensland, Mr Littleproud also announced a committee had been established to help deliver drought resilience and preparedness programs to communities.
As reported by The Australian, the failure by the Coalition to push ahead water infrastructure projects it wants the states to build with the help of federal funding means that at the end of this term in government, it will not have seen a single major dam built or likely even started construction after nine years in office.
Only minor dam projects in Tasmania have been built on the Coalition’s watch. “Since 2003, of the 20 dams completed in Australia, 16 of them are in Tasmania,” Mr Littleproud said.
“If NSW, Queensland and Victoria don’t start building dams, their water storage capacity will fall by more than 30 per cent by 2030.”
Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, who holds the water infrastructure portfolio, has created a new advisory body called the National Water Grid to coordinate funding for water infrastructure projects.
Mr Littleproud said while the federal government had offered $1.3 billion for new projects through the National Water Infrastructure Development Fund in 2015, it “still had to drag most states kicking and screaming to build new dams.”
Apart from the decline in availability of municipal water to many towns, the lack of rain in the Murray-Darling Basin, couple with the federal government’s buy-backs of water licences from irrigators and more demand from horticulture, has sent the price of water for agriculture skyrocketing on the spot market.
“Building dams will make sure we still have clean drinking water in regional towns and bring down the price of water to produce food,” Mr Littleproud said.
“This is not just about agriculture, it’s about water security and food prices in our towns and capital cities.”
Mr Littleproud announced the Future Drought Fund Consultative Committee, describing it as “an important milestone in taking action on drought.”
The committee will develop the Drought Resilience Funding Plan for the fund, which begins with a $3.9 billion credit that will grow to $5 billion, he said.
“The Future Drought Fund was established to give drought-prone Australians the best tools to plan and prepare for drought and sustain their livelihoods and communities,” Mr Littleproud said.
The Consultative Committee will seek input directly from drought-vulnerable communities for the Drought Resilience Funding Plan.
“This committee is made up of people with track records of success in agricultural economics, managing climate risk, rural and regional development and natural resource management,” Mr Littleproud said.
Mr Littleproud said the committee’s chairman would be Brent Finlay, and the committee members Kate Andrews, Wendy Craik, Elizabeth Peterson and Caroline Welsh who would begin their work in Canberra later this month.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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17 September, 2019
The solar panel toxic waste problem
For decades, the solar industry benefited from generous federal, state, and local subsidies to increase its footprint. Yet these generous subsidies ignore the costs of disposal of solar panel waste.
Things may be changing. In May 2018, Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner, wrote in Forbes that the problem of solar panel disposal will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment because it is a huge amount of waste which is not easy to recycle.
Shellenberger was citing comments, published in the South China Morning Post, from Chinese solar expert Tian Min, general manager of Nanjing Fangrun Materials, a recycling company in Jiangsu province that collects retired solar panels. Tian called his country’s solar power industry “a ticking time bomb.”
This is not really news. The Associated Press had reported in 2013 that the heavily subsidized solar industry was creating millions of pounds of polluted sludge and contaminated water that is often shipped landfills often hundreds of miles away.
The now-defunct, bankrupted Solyndra used its $535 million in guaranteed federal dollars to generate about 12.5 million pounds of hazardous waste, much of which was carcinogenic cadmium-contaminated waste, during its four years of operations.
But, you say, solar energy is clean, green, and mean – and taking over the world one massive array at a time. Isn’t that what we have all been told?
The truth can be brutal. The average lifespan of a solar panel is about 20 years, but high temperatures (as in the Mojave Desert) can accelerate the aging process for solar cells, and snow, dust, and other natural events (tornadoes, earthquakes),can cause material fatigue on the surface and in the internal electric circuits – gradually reducing the panel’s power output.
Solar panels generate 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants. They also contain lead, cadmium, and other toxic (even carcinogenic) chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel. Worse, rainwater can wash many of these toxics out of the fragments of solar modules over time.
Another real concern is the vast increase in the use of nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) in the construction of solar panels – up 1,057 percent over the past 25 years. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deems NF3 to be 17,200 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas – meaning that even relatively minor quantities can have major impacts.
While the European Union has long required solar panel manufacturers to collect and dispose of solar waste, in the U.S. until very recently only Washington State had any recycling requirements. Yet even their standards did not address costs.
Proponents like to cite the small size of the industry to date as a reason to ignore recycling requirements and costs in their business plans. But the deeper truth is that the costs for solar waste disposal can be huge. As Cara Libby, senior technical leader of solar energy at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), put it, “I’ve heard that [recycling] will have to be mandated because it won’t ever be economical.”
Japan is also facing a growing solar waste problem. In a November 2016 article, Osamu Tomioka stated that Japanese solar panel waste will likely grow from the current 10,000 tons a year to 800,000 tons a year – and that just to recycle all of the waste produced through 2020 will take 19 years. How long will it take, and at what cost, to recycle 80 times that amount?
A 2018 report from the Institute of Energy Research suggests imposing a recycling fee on solar panel purchases. A federal disposal and decommissioning fund would then dispense funds to state and local governments to help pay for removal and recycling or long-term storage of solar panel waste. [Similar fees help recover costs for nuclear waste disposal and coal mine reclamation for bankrupt facilities.]
But how much of a fee would be needed? IER admits that recycling costs are generally more than the economic value of the materials they recover. And bankruptcies have been all too common in an industry that has relied so heavily on disappearing subsidies.
The simple truth is that it is past time for a real accounting of the overall costs to the public and to the environment of a massive increase in the use of solar panels as compared, for example, of increased reliance on non-intermittent technologies like nuclear energy and natural gas.
SOURCE
House of Representatives working to bring back energy dependence
The House of Representatives is advancing a series of bills designed to permanently block access to huge portions of America’s vast oil reserves.
Dr. Jay Lehr reports at CFACT.org that the House wants endless moratoriums (depending on the bill) on pumping oil in the Atlantic and Pacific outer continental shelf, the Gulf of Mexico, along the Florida coast, the entire Arctic National Wildlife refuge (ANWR) and others.
The 1973 Arab oil embargo proved just how dangerous dependence on foreign oil can be. Many of us still remember skyrocketing prices, long lines at the pump, out of control inflation and throbbing economic pain.
Foreign oil dependence is not only dangerous for the American economy, it places our national defense, and with it the security of the world, in real jeopardy.
For decades politicians promised energy independence, but accomplished little. The private sector stepped up. The shale energy revolution and discovery of tremendous oil reserves in the U.S. and Canada brought what was once an unrealistic goal into solid being.
Today the United States is at or near the top of world energy production. Green zealots and their political allies want to shut America’s energy wonder down to the delight of OPEC and Russia.
It takes a special kind of stupid to think that dependence on foreign oil and higher fuel and electricity prices would be good for America or the world.
SOURCE
Climate Change and the Democrats
Climate change is one of those issues that the bien-pensants around the world all agree upon. We must act! If we do not act, people will lose their beach houses. Plants will wither and die. Birds will fall from the sky. Just last week, whole communities in the Caribbean were swept away.
There are, however, problems with eliminating or ameliorating climate change. For one thing, modern technology cannot seem to keep up with people’s ability to dream. Daydreams outpace technology every time. Dream up a problem such as climate change and I guarantee you it will be years before climate change is solved by technology. Though when I ponder some of the solutions now being offered for climate change, it might be worth the wait.
Consider Congressgirl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has dreamed up a vast scheme. She calls it the Green New Deal. It envisages all our homes and office buildings, and even factories being revised and rebuilt according to her green code. Others are more moderate. They would only wipe out the commercial airline industry, though the automobile industry could be next. Already there is an ambitious plan afoot in our country to end the life of the plastic straw.
Oh, yes, there is another problem with climate change. It is not a winning issue with the electorate. Any government that attempts this sort of Green Adventure almost immediately falls. I cannot think of a country on Earth whose majority supports climate change legislation. Possibly there is one in the Vatican. We know the pope favors it. Yet I would say that the Vatican is not a conventional democracy.
Australia is a conventional democracy, and climate change legislation has not done very well in Australia. Seven prime ministers have come to power in Australia in recent years, and all came a cropper in one way or another because of climate change. The most famous example of a climate changer being defeated by a climate change denier in Australia was in 2013. In that election, then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who ran on a platform of carbon taxes, was demolished by Tony Abbott, who once referred to climate change activism as crap. He sounds downright Trumpian to me.
Last Wednesday, we saw the Democrats’ lonely crowd of candidates traipse across a stage for a ghostly pageant hosted by CNN. The network finished dead last in the ratings that night, with the other two cable news channels elbowing it aside. The network’s average audience during the seven-hour event (yes, seven-hour!) was a measly 1.1 million viewers, according to The Hill. The topic of the spectacular was climate change. Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, apparently thought it was the major issue with the Democratic hopefuls, and obviously, they agreed.
Gaffable Joe Biden, Pocahontas, Comrade Bernie Sanders and all the rest arrived on stage Wednesday night to talk about climate change all night long if need be. They compared it to World War II. They compared it to cancer. They blamed it for wars already in progress and wars in the future. One ludicrous comparison was between climate change and overpopulation. The wretched of Africa could be saved by Planned Parenthood’s arrival to the Dark Continent, all wearing pith helmets and garb from L.L. Bean.
Frankly, the Democrats’ obsession with climate change is more than odd. It is delusional. As The American Spectator’s Hunt Lawrence and Daniel J. Flynn wrote in commenting on the Wednesday night revels, health care “matters to voters in a real, tangible way, and not in an abstract sense like climate change.” Health care consumes 18 percent of the American budget, trending upward toward 20 percent by mid-decade. Americans now spend $3.5 trillion or so on health care, with the federal, state and local government footing 45% of the bill. How will we pay for it in 2025? The subject was not even discussed last Wednesday by the leading Democratic contenders.
Lawrence and Flynn are putting their money on health care, not climate change, as an issue in 2020.
SOURCE
White House moving forward to strip California of vehicle authority
The Trump administration is moving forward with a plan to revoke California’s authority to set its own vehicle greenhouse gas standards and declare that states are pre-empted from setting their own vehicle rules, three people briefed on the matter said on Thursday.
President Donald Trump met with senior officials on Thursday at the White House to discuss the administration’s plan to divide its August 2018 proposal to rollback Obama era standards through 2025 and revoke California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act to set state requirements for vehicles, the people said.
The meeting included Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and acting Office and Management and Budget director Russell Vought, the sources said.
The White House and the agencies declined to comment.
On Tuesday, Wheeler told reporters the administration had not made a final decision to divide the rule into two parts.
Following the meeting, sources said the administration plans to move ahead in coming weeks to divide the final regulation and finalize first the portion dealing with preempting states before issuing the new yearly standards.
The EPA in August 2018 proposed revoking a waiver granted to California in 2013 under the Clean Air Act as part of the Trump administration’s plan to roll back Obama-era fuel economy standards.
Under Trump, federal regulators backed freezing emissions requirements for new cars and trucks at 2020 levels through 2026. Administration officials say its final regulation will include a modest boost in annual efficiency requirements but far less than what the Obama administration set in 2012.
The Obama-era rules called for a fleetwide fuel efficiency average of 46.7 mpg by 2025, with average annual increases of about 5%, compared with 37 mpg by 2026 under the Trump administration’s preferred option to freeze requirements.
Last week, Reuters and other news outlets reported the U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether the decision of four automakers in July to reach a voluntary agreement with California to adopt state emissions standards violated antitrust law.
Ford Motor Co, BMW AG, Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) and Honda Motor Co struck a deal to adopt standards that were lower than Obama era rules but higher than the Trump administration’s 2018 proposal.
California and other states had vowed to enforce stricter Obama-era emissions standards, after Trump proposed rolling back the federal rules. Automakers worry that court battles between state and federal governments could create years of uncertainty.
SOURCE
Australian Leftist leader reveals climate change review
After being out of power since 2013 and losing an "unlosable" election, they have cause to change their policies
Opposition leader Anthony Albanese has not ruled out scrapping Bill Shorten’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030, saying the party would now re-examine its promises on climate change.
Mr Albanese and his climate spokesman Mark Butler both shied away from recommitting to the target on Sunday, amid frontbench division on how ambitious Labor’s 2022 election policy on climate change should be.
“(The 45 per cent target) was a commitment that was given in 2015,” Mr Albanese told reporters in Sydney.
“We will examine our short and medium and long term commitments on where we go on climate change but we won’t re-examine our principles. We want to work towards zero emissions by the middle of this century.”
Mr Butler said any new emissions reduction target would still be higher than the Prime Minister’s Paris Agreement aim of 26 to 28 per cent.
“It’s clear 26-28 per cent is fundamentally inconsistent with the obligation to keep global warming way below 2 degrees.” Mr Butler told ABC News.
Asked if he was prepared to restate a commitment to Labor’s 45 per cent target, he would not be drawn.
“What I have said is all our policies are up for review exactly what medium-term targets, numerically are, whether it’s 2030 or 2035 given the passage of time is something we’ll engage over in the next couple of years.
“People can be assured it would be an medium term target utterly consistent with the best scientific advice about how we meet those commitments in the Paris Agreement and keep global warming well below 2 degrees and pursue efforts around 1.5.
“That is our generation’s responsibility to our children around our grandchildren and a responsibility or an obligation really that this government is simply shying away from.”
Former deputy leader Tanya Plibersek was the only Labor MP on Thursday to say she backed an “ambitious” target, following revelations in The Australian that the party’s 45 per cent target could be scrapped and a stronger focus given to its 2050 net zero pollution target.
The Greens and environmental groups slammed any weakening of the target, with Greens leader Richard Di Natale accusing Labor of “caving in to the coal, oil and gas lobby”.
Labor’s assistant Treasury and financial services spokesman Stephen Jones said the party would struggle to meet a 45 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030 if Anthony Albanese won government at the next election.
Labor’s agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said the ALP should devise climate change policies that would ensure Australia met its Paris obligations “without doing damage to our economy”.
The comments came as Mr Albanese criticised the government for failing to deal with the drought, after revelations swathes of NSW could run out of water in the next six months.
“The government needs to next week actually come up with a plan for the economy, they need to come up with a plan for the drought,” he said.
“We have a circumstance whereby Dubbo is due to run out of water by November, so the government needs to come up with a drought strategy.
“It’s about time they introduced legislation to deal with the challenges Australia faces rather than just ‘wedge-islation’ to just play politics.”
On Saturday, Nationals leader and Deputy PM Michael McCormack used the party’s federal council meeting to launch the National Water Grid Authority, a $100 million organisation to help secure Australia’s long-term water supplies.
It will bring together scientists and harness local knowledge to shape national water infrastructure policy and identify opportunities for new projects. “It’s has been too long since we built a major dam in this country,” Mr McCormack said.
“This government is establishing the National Water Grid to take out the state- based politics and insert the science with a national-based approach to water security for Australia’s future.” The government has committed to 21 water infrastructure projects with a total construction value of $2 billion.
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 September, 2019
UK: The plane snobbery of environmentalists
A plan to disrupt flights at Heathrow Airport is part of an effort to make us ashamed of air travel.
Anti-flying activists are back. This Friday a group called Heathrow Pause plans to fly toy drones ‘at a maximum height of six feet, outside flight paths’ close to Heathrow Airport, forcing air traffic control to ground all flights. The point, so Heathrow Pause puts it, is not just to put a stop to government plans to expand Heathrow Airport, but also ‘to draw attention to the most serious and urgent crisis humanity has ever faced’.
But, as ever with greens, there seems to be another, deeper campaign being waged. A war against us, against our behaviour.
From the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s late 18th-century screeds against the proliferating poor and the dangers of Enlightenment thinking, to the Green Party’s origins among a disillusioned group of Conservative Party members in the 1970s, environmentalism has always been fuelled by a certain class prejudice. This is not tangential to the environmentalist worldview – it is central to it. That’s because its target has always been the errant behaviour of the ‘race of labourers’, as Malthus had it. Those who, if they’re not procreating far more than they should, are consuming more than they ought.
While on the global stage this takes the form of First World greens wringing their hands over the rapid industrialisation and rising appetites of the ‘races of labourers’ in hitherto underdeveloped nations, domestically it still coalesces around an attack on the material aspirations of the so-called lower classes. And in the UK, in recent years, this attack on people’s consumption habits has focused on one activity in particular: flying. Or, to be more precise, cheap flying. Hence as budget airlines like Ryannair or easyJet emerged during the 1990s, and prices to Malaga or Athens plummeted, so environmentalist campaigners took to the runways.
Plane Stupid, a gang of entitled hoorays and the most prominent of the anti-cheap-flight brigade, sweated snobbery in spite of its best deoderising efforts. Its self-righteous members just couldn’t help themselves. They talked disdainfully of ‘stag and hen nights to Eastern European destinations’, and complained that this new type of passenger had no interest in the ‘architecture or culture’ of Europe’s metropoles. The object of Plane Stupid’s attacks was never simply cheap flights — it was always the cheap, uncultured plebs doing the flying.
To be fair, Heathrow Pause is not as nakedly snobbish as its precursors. It is attacking the frequent business fliers of Heathrow rather than the leisure flyers of Stansted. And rather than mock those heading to Spain for some sun, it speaks in the grandiose language of Extinction Rebellion, invoking the climate emergency, much as would-be dictators call states of emergency in order to suspend civil liberty and justify all and any action necessary – in this case, disrupting the everyday lives of thousands upon thousands of air passengers. What’s more, it tries to paint this unfunny stunt as one in the eye for the rich, pointing out that flying is overwhelmingly concentrated among the wealthiest citizens, with 15 per cent of the UK population accounting for 70 per cent of flights.
That stat could be grounds for seeking to make air travel cheaper still, rather than further restricting it. But Heathrow Pause, like Plane Stupid before it, has no interest in expanding the freedom granted by airflight. Quite the opposite. Beneath the anti-rich posture, that age-old, aristocratic desire to restrict, reduce and ultimately change the material aspirations of the uppity masses persists. That’s why there is no interest in the air industry’s desire to decarbonise air travel. They don’t want a technological solution; they want a behavioural one.
Here we come to the purpose of the protest. Heathrow Pause ostensibly claims it wants to stop the expansion of Heathrow Airport, and force the government to honour parliament’s declaration of a climate emergency, complete with a pledge to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions to zero by 2050. And no doubt Heathrow Pause does want that to happen. But the actual point, indeed the desired impact, of the drone display is not really to exert pressure on Westminster. It’s not even really about Heathrow. Rather, it is about flying in general. It wants to change people’s perception of flying – it wants to stigmatise it, turn it into a source of profound guilt, an object of shame.
Heathrow Pause does not go as far as the Guardian’s George Monbiot did in 1999, when he claimed transatlantic flights should be deemed as ‘unacceptable’ as child abuse. But it still draws on the same desire to demonise, to shame us into changing our ways, just as Malthus sought to paint the behaviour of the mass of 18th-century labourers as licentiously leading us towards our doom. Through its ‘symbolic act’, it wants us to associate all plane flight with planetary harm.
Hence Heathrow Pause activists, pursuing the trail blazed by anti-smoking activists, argue that too many of us consider flying to be a ‘normalised, even hypernormalised’ activity. They want to ‘denormalise’ flying. Which is another way of saying they want to stigmatise flying. They want us to experience and perceive catching a cheap flight to Spain as being as immoral as anti-smoking activists have made lighting up in a car full of kids. If they could, they would no doubt insist on a graphic image of environmental devastation on every plane ticket, alongside the reminder that ‘Flying Kills’.
But failing that, they will content themselves with merely making air travel just that little bit more exclusive again. For that is always the real effect of the green-branded war on consumption habits, from cheap meat to cheap flight: green taxes and price rises. They want air travel to become what it used to be. Something only a small, privileged minority can enjoy – guiltily but necessarily, as they fly to the latest Extinction Rebellion protest.
SOURCE
These starving polar bears falsely blamed on climate change have scared kids to death
These four images of thin or emaciated polar bears falsely blamed on climate change have scared kids like Greta Thunburg to death
If you see kids marching with signs you know they have seen the white lies that have been spread online.
Here I summarize the truth about all four of these starving polar bear images that have been used since 2009 to emotionally manipulate the public (especially young girls), into getting on board the climate change band wagon. Rational people have seen through the rhetoric and come to realize that climate change is virtually never the cause of starvation. However, some poor kids have been scared to death by these images and the stories of climate change catastrophe they inspired – they are very real victims of climate change messaging at its worst.
2009 AN ACT OF CANNIBALISM
An act of cannibalism by a lean – but not starving – adult male in November 2009 near Churchill was witnessed by tourists and caught on film by professional photographer Daniel Cox. It was falsely blamed on climate change by polar bear specialist Ian Stirling. The truth is that even fat adult males will kill and eat cubs: they don’t do it just because they are desperate for food. The news media ran with the story and despite rational people trying to set the record straight, the images and false message went viral on social media. My take on it and other incidents of cannibalism here and here.
2013 – SVALBARD STARVING DEAD BEAR
In August 2013, polar bear specialist was acting as a guide for wealthy tourists in Svalbard, Norway when he came across the carcass of an emaciated polar bear. Stirling told the media it had probably died from lack of sea ice caused by climate change when he had no evidence that this was the case. Starvation is the leading natural cause of death for all polar bears. More on another dead starving bear sob story from 2014 here.
2015 – SVALBARD STARVING BEAR
The hype over a photo of an apparently injured and emaciated polar bear near Svalbard was almost entirely social-media-driven. A photographer with no knowledge of polar bears took the picture and posted it on Facebook with her uninformed speculation that this was caused by climate change to get an emotional reaction from people – and it went viral. Traditional media stories followed. Norwegian polar bear specialist Magnus Andersen pointed out that the photographer’s conclusion was erroneous and reiterated my point that starvation is the leading natural cause of death for old animals. This time, Ian Stirling stated that lack of sea ice was not likely the cause of this bear’s condition but that it was probably hurt or sick.
2017 – NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC STARVING BEAR
This is the video that jumped the shark – the film of an emaciated bear on Somerset Island in the Canadian Arctic (falsely report initially as Baffin Island) used to tell the public that “this is what climate change looks like.” The video went mega-viral, apparently viewed more than 2.5 billion times. Some questions were raised about the photographer’s ethics in his quest for an image to fit his global warming message. National Geographic later apologized for the message, admitting that there was no evidence that climate change had caused the bear’s poor condition. It was the biggest of the four white lies.
SOURCE
Trump EPA Praised for Plan to End Use of Animal Testing in 15 Years
This will cause a lot of drug disasters if it is followed. More likely it will just transfer a lot of the scientific work to China
The Environmental Protection Agency’s move to curtail its use of animal testing, ending it within 15 years, is drawing praise from members of Congress and a broad cross-section of advocacy groups.
The Trump administration’s EPA this week set in motion an abrupt change in policy that requires the agency to seek alternative research methods.
A memo signed by EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler calls for a 30 percent reduction in the agency’s requests and funding of research studies using mammals by 2025, according to a press release.
Wheeler’s memo Tuesday also calls for the elimination of all requests and funding for mammal studies by 2035.
Wheeler’s directive puts the onus on the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention and the Office of Research and Development to produce “measurable impacts in the reduction of animal testing while ensuring protection of human health and the environment.”
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the prominent nonprofit group promoting animal rights, is among advocacy groups expressing strong support for the EPA initiative.
“PETA is celebrating the EPA’s decision to protect animals certainly—but also humans and the environment—by switching from cruel and scientifically flawed animal tests in favor of modern, non-animal testing methods,” Amy Clippinger, director of PETA’s Regulatory Testing Department, said in a written statement.
Clippinger has a doctorate in cellular and molecular biology and genetics.
“PETA will be helping regulatory agencies and companies switch to efficient and effective, non-animal testing approaches and working toward a day when all animal tests are only found in history books,” Clippinger said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said he sees an opportunity for other federal agencies to follow suit.
“I am thrilled to hear that the EPA is greatly reducing its reliance on animal tests, and promoting non-animal-based research at universities,” Gaetz said, adding:
Animal testing is often cruel and painful, with limited applicability to human health outcomes. Non-animal research is more accurate, more cost-effective, and more humane. I commend the EPA for their decision, and hope other departments and agencies will soon follow suit.
Wheeler also said Tuesday that his agency will provide $4.25 million in grants to five universities through the agency’s Science to Achieve Results Program.
The grant money will be used “to advance the research and development of alternative test methods for evaluating the safety of chemicals that will minimize, and hopefully eliminate, the need for animal testing,” Wheeler said.
With an eye toward taxpayer protection, the White Coat Waste Project also had words of praise for Wheeler and his agency.
Anthony Bellotti, president and founder of the taxpayer watchdog group, which counts 2 million supporters, said the EPA’s action represents “the most comprehensive and aggressive plan in U.S. history to cut wasteful animal testing.”
A “supermajority” of Americans in all political parties support the goal, Bellott said.
“The Trump administration has shown outstanding leadership to curb unnecessary taxpayer-funded animal tests and this development at the EPA is another remarkable win for animals, taxpayers, industry, and the environment,” he said.
SOURCE
16-year-old climate acvitist Greta Thunberg joins small global warming protest of 'striking' schoolchildren outside the White House
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl who is criss-crossing the globe to save it from global warming, said Friday that despite being the star attraction at a Washington, D.C. protest, she wasn't trying to communicate anything to the U.S. government.
As a few hundred 'striking' schoolchildren assembled near the White House for a march, DailyMail.com asked Thunberg from about 10 feet away: 'Do you have a message for President Trump?'
'No,' came the reply. The young activist had the same answer to an identical question about whether she had a message for the U.S. Congress.
DailyMail.com asked the question twice to be sure Thunberg, who has the developmental disorder Asperger syndrome, heard and understood it.
The Trump administration is openly skeptical about global warming, and the president has claimed the idea of man-made climate change is a 'hoax' instigated by China 'in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.'
He has withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate accord, and the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate shows no sign of acting on a Democratic House bill to reverse that move.
Trump has also mocked global warming activists and their Democratic Party allies during winter months as president, gloating on Twitter every time a cold snap hits the Northeast U.S.
He softened his position during a '60 Minutes' interview in 2018, allowing that 'Something’s changing' in the global climate, but 'it’ll change back again.'
'I don’t think it’s a hoax,' he added then, 'But I don’t know that it’s manmade. I will say this. I don’t wanna give trillions and trillions of dollars. I don’t wanna lose millions and millions of jobs.'
Friday's rally ended with a brief speech from Thunberg, who congratulated marchers for skipping school but didn't lodge any demands for America to change.
'I'm so incredibly grateful for every single one of you,' she told the group, and I'm so proud of you.' 'Never give up. We will continue,' she said.
Climate demonstrations in Europe have generated far larger turnout when the pixieish Thunberg is scheduled to appear. And unlike her quiet approach to Washington, she has leveled ultimatums there.
'For way too long the politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything ... But we will make sure that they will not get away with it any longer," she said during a London rally in April.
Thousands showed up in Rome to hear her speak.
She is taking a sabbatical year from school in order to be a full-time activist.
She attracted media coverage last month with a trans-Atlantic voyage on a 'zero-carbon yacht' meant to demonstrate that it was possible to travel without a carbon footprint.
It was revealed later, however, that two crew members would have to fly to New York to pilot the 60-foot yacht back to Europe. And two original crew members were expected to fly back to Europe as they rotated out.
That may have generated more carbon emissions than the boat trip saved.
SOURCE
Don't Be Quick to Write Off Natural Gas
Earlier this month, as temperatures topped 100 degrees and homeowners and businesses cranked up their air conditioning, Texas' grid struggled to cope with the record demand for electricity. The heat wave was compounded by a loss of power from thousands of wind turbines that couldn't function on days when not so much as a breeze was blowing. Predictably, energy costs skyrocketed in the Lone Star State.
In Houston, as peak electricity demand climbed to record levels, wholesale power prices spiked virtually overnight by an astounding 49,000% (to $9,000 per megawatt-hour). The operator of the electric grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), warned that reserve margins were so dangerously low that it might have to institute rolling blackouts. ERCOT called for the construction of more gas-powered generating plants.
Yet, a number of states, most notably California, want to push natural gas out of the picture, putting residents on a collision course with reality.
No one should think that the days of burning natural gas for electricity production are numbered, or that gas has been overtaken by solar and wind. America's vast gas reserves and the development of combined-cycle power plants, using gas and a steam turbine to generate 50% more electricity than traditional gas plants, together with advanced designs and better efficiency will keep natural gas in the energy picture for decades to come.
According to the Energy Information Administration, natural gas currently meets 28% of U.S. energy demand, while about 24% comes from coal and 11% from renewables.
Natural gas is among our cheapest energy sources. As more and more gas-fired power plants replace coal-fired plants, it is also having a significant effect on the environment, reducing power-plant emissions by 50% more since 2005 than wind and solar power combined.
The trend will continue. Two hundred and eighty coal-fired plants, more than half of the U.S. coal fleet, have either closed or announced plans to close since 2010. Time is running out for the remaining 240 coal plants. But lawmakers in several states aren't satisfied with the progress and are now campaigning to leave gas in the ground.
Take California. A new mandate even more ambitious than California's Renewables Portfolio Standard commits the state to achieving 100 percent zero-carbon electricity by 2045. Nine other states, including New York, Washington, New Mexico and Hawaii, have set the same target or are considering it. Natural gas might have no political future in those states.
Such measures are ominous because the nation needs more, not less, natural gas to fill the gap left by the closure of coal and obsolete nuclear power plants. The danger of not having enough baseload power has already become evident in Texas, California and New England. Serious challenges facing grid reliability have emerged, particularly in Texas, where wind energy accounts for about one-fourth of the state's generating capacity.
While wind and solar generating capacity continue to increase-hitting new records in 2018-policies mandating the phase out of natural gas ignore the limitations of these sources of energy.
Increasing reliance on renewables may sound good environmentally, but neither the sun nor the wind can provide reliable "baseload" capacity that can be dispatched, as needed, when it is abnormally hot or cold. Gas plants, on the other hand are uniquely capable of ramping up quickly and hit maximum output in a matter of minutes, keeping the lights on and air conditioners humming. Looking ahead, we'll need more natural gas, not less.
Fortunately, more than 15,000 megawatts of new combined-cycle natural gas generating capacity-enough to power as many as 4.5 million homes 24/7-is scheduled to begin operating nationally by 2020. Stopping or delaying those additions to the grid are recipes for brownouts or blackouts.
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 September, 2019
Gloom! Another attempt to demonize air pollution in the USA fails
They do not mention it in their conclusions below but I have put a rubric on the important finding: By the conclusion of the study, fine particulate air pollution (fine soot) was NOT associated with emphysema.
The pollution that Greenies rage about is fine particle (PM2.5) pollution in the atmosphere. Such pollution is rather heavily emitted by motor vehicles and we all know what Greenies think of motor vehicles -- as they drive off in their Volvos or try to deny what is the major source of power in their Priuses.
And one of the nastiest forms of lung damage is emphysema. Emphysemics feel fairly well but struggle even to get up a flight of stairs, which is super frustrating. So Greenies are certain that America's polluted skies must cause emphysema. But the study below says not so. How frustrating! It's actually heavy smokers who get emphysema
Association Between Long-term Exposure to Ambient Air Pollution and Change in Quantitatively Assessed Emphysema and Lung Function
By Meng Wang et al.
Abstract
Importance: While air pollutants at historical levels have been associated with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, it is not known whether exposure to contemporary air pollutant concentrations is associated with progression of emphysema.
Objective: To assess the longitudinal association of ambient ozone (O3), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), oxides of nitrogen (NOx), and black carbon exposure with change in percent emphysema assessed via computed tomographic (CT) imaging and lung function.
Design, Setting, and Participants: This cohort study included participants from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) Air and Lung Studies conducted in 6 metropolitan regions of the United States, which included 6814 adults aged 45 to 84 years recruited between July 2000 and August 2002, and an additional 257 participants recruited from February 2005 to May 2007, with follow-up through November 2018.
Exposures: Residence-specific air pollutant concentrations (O3, PM2.5, NOx, and black carbon) were estimated by validated spatiotemporal models incorporating cohort-specific monitoring, determined from 1999 through the end of follow-up.
Main Outcomes and Measures: Percent emphysema, defined as the percent of lung pixels less than ?950 Hounsfield units, was assessed up to 5 times per participant via cardiac CT scan (2000-2007) and equivalent regions on lung CT scans (2010-2018). Spirometry was performed up to 3 times per participant (2004-2018).
Results: Among 7071 study participants (mean [range] age at recruitment, 60 [45-84] years; 3330 [47.1%] were men), 5780 were assigned outdoor residential air pollution concentrations in the year of their baseline examination and during the follow-up period and had at least 1 follow-up CT scan, and 2772 had at least 1 follow-up spirometric assessment, over a median of 10 years.
Median percent emphysema was 3% at baseline and increased a mean of 0.58 percentage points per 10 years. Mean ambient concentrations of PM2.5 and NOx, but not O3, decreased substantially during follow-up. Ambient concentrations of O3, PM2.5, NOx, and black carbon at study baseline were significantly associated with greater increases in percent emphysema per 10 years (O3: 0.13 per 3 parts per billion [95% CI, 0.03-0.24]; PM2.5: 0.11 per 2 ?g/m3 [95% CI, 0.03-0.19]; NOx: 0.06 per 10 parts per billion [95% CI, 0.01-0.12]; black carbon: 0.10 per 0.2 ?g/m3 [95% CI, 0.01-0.18]).
Ambient O3 and NOx concentrations, but not PM2.5 concentrations, during follow-up were also significantly associated with greater increases in percent emphysema.
Ambient O3 concentrations, but not other pollutants, at baseline and during follow-up were significantly associated with a greater decline in forced expiratory volume in 1 second per 10 years (baseline: 13.41 mL per 3 parts per billion [95% CI, 0.7-26.1]; follow-up: 18.15 mL per 3 parts per billion [95% CI, 1.59-34.71]).
Conclusions and Relevance: In this cohort study conducted between 2000 and 2018 in 6 US metropolitan regions, long-term exposure to ambient air pollutants was significantly associated with increasing emphysema assessed quantitatively using CT imaging and lung function.
SOURCE
Morano debates hurricanes & ‘climate change’ with U. of Maryland Professor on Eric Bolling’s TV Show
Broadcast September 3, 2019 – America This Week – Eric Bolling
Bolling was joined in this debate by Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm and, the chairman of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Department at the University of Maryland and Marc Morano the founder of ClimateDepot.
Notes:
Extreme weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.: On hurricanes – and more generally, tropical cyclones — we are fortunate that there have been two recent consensus statements of experts produced by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, Part 1 and Part 2) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). These statements, along with the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and U.S. National Climate Assessment (USNCA) provide a robust and reliable guide to the current views of relevant experts on the science of hurricanes and climate change.
NOAA concludes “an anthropogenic influence has not been formally detected for hurricane precipitation,” but finds it likely that increases will occur this century. Similarly, the WMO concluded, “no observational studies have provided convincing evidence of a detectable anthropogenic influence specifically on hurricane-related precipitation,” but also that an increase should be expected this century…The WMO assessment concludes: “anthropogenic signals are not yet clearly detectable in observations for most TC (tropical cyclones) metrics.”
The U.S. National Climate Assessment concurred, explaining that there is agreement on predictions for a future increase in hurricane-related rainfall, but “a limiting factor for confidence in the results is the lack of a supporting detectable anthropogenic contribution in observed tropical cyclone data.” … The USNCA agrees: “A key uncertainty in tropical cyclones (TCs) is the lack of a supporting detectable anthropogenic signal in the historical data to add further confidence to these projections [of the future].”
Hurricane Dorian stats: – 185 mph lifetime maximum sustained winds – tied with Gilbert (1988) and Wilma (2005) for the 2nd strongest maximum sustained winds in the Atlantic basin since 1950. Allen (1980) had maximum sustained winds of 190 mph. – 910 hPa lifetime minimum central pressure – tied for 9th lowest pressure
The Deeply Destructive Climate Change Litigation Game
Voters and their elected representatives can be stubbornly uncooperative with interest groups pursuing the achievement of specific policy ends. “Heavy lifting” is the only way to describe an effort to forge a Congressional coalition in support of specific legislation, and “herculean” is the proper adjective for a campaign to elect legislative majorities inclined to support it.
This is particularly the case in the context of climate policies intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). Such legislative efforts have been rejected by voters and by Congress several times. So what is a pressure group convinced of the truth of its climate arguments, the urgent necessity of its own policy aims, and the nefarious nature of its opponents---“Big Oil”--- to do?
For much of the policy community arguing the crucial imperative of “action” on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the perfidy of the oil industry, this gordian knot can be cut only with litigation, that is, policymaking by the judiciary. A central example of an organization advocating such climate litigation at the municipal level and among state attorneys general calls itself Climate Communications and Law (CCL), about which more below. The behavior and motivations of such groups as CCL deserve far more scrutiny than reporters and other observers have offered.
For now it is more central to examine the pitfalls of litigation masquerading as policy formulation, on the general theory that the production (not consumption) of fossil fuels has created a large “public nuisance” in the form of such climate risks as flooding in coastal regions and the like. At the most basic level, it is obvious that no coherent policy on GHG emissions can emerge from dozens of lawsuits against the producers of fossil fuels filed in state or federal courts alleging “public nuisance” harm. This reality alone makes it clear that the reduction of GHG emissions, supposedly one of the central aims of the litigation strategy, in reality is a sideshow. Far more fundamental, apart from a straightforward money grab, are the ideological goals of hammering the fossil-fuel industry narrowly, and of politicizing and rationing energy use more broadly, and thus reducing the private-sector freedom, enterprise, productive efficiency, and market exchange that abundant energy supplies facilitate.
There is the further matter that that “Big Oil” is so small a part of global industrial operations that elimination of the GHG missions from consumption of the fuels produced by those producers would have virtually no impact on climate phenomena. Whatever the current or prospective harms caused by GHG emissions: Can anyone argue seriously that Big Oil is responsible for all of them? What about other fossil-fuel producers---Aramco and the Russian oil and gas industry and many others come to mind---and agricultural activities, cement production, coal output, ad infinitum? That the litigation is being aimed at only the five or so large producers actually vulnerable in American courts speaks volumes about the pecuniary, ideological, and political imperatives actually underlying this effort. Or is it the goal of the groups promoting such litigation to win these suits and then take aim at one economic sector after another, thus imposing massive losses upon the U.S. economy writ large?
It is no small source of amusement that the plaintiff cities and states being encouraged to file GHG lawsuits have been large consumers of fossil fuels for many decades. Why are they not responsible for climate phenomena? And the same question applies to all other consumers of fossil fuels, which means every single person and business, literally. Obviously, the litigation strategy aimed only at Big Oil is designed to avoid a massive political pushback. The groups promoting such litigation are engaged in self-deception if they believe that a large increase in fuel prices caused by litigation losses will fail to engender a firestorm in Congress, led by policymakers representing producers and consumers of fossil fuels. The tobacco settlement from 1998 will not prove to be a useful model; far fewer people were involved in the production and consumption of cigarettes.
The argument that Big Oil “knew” in the 1980s the adverse effects of GHG emissions in this century is preposterous: Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its most recent assessment report discusses large uncertainties about prospective effects on sea levels and the like. Because the uses of crude oil and natural gas are myriad---fuels, petrochemicals, plastics, and on and on---with GHG emissions outcomes that vary tremendously---litigation, again, is deeply dubious as a regulatory tool. If GHG emissions are likely to result in substantial harm---a premise that is very far from obvious---then it is clear that regulation driven by real expertise and the standard public-notice-and-comment requirements of administrative law would be vastly superior in terms of balancing the benefits and costs of fossil-fuel use.
That the organizations promoting such a litigation approach are driven by ideological imperatives is no secret, as they are supported largely by left-wing foundations and other groups deeply opposed to fossil fuels as a matter of principle. CCL is one such group; it is headed by a former Greenpeace activist. Interestingly enough, CCL has been accused credibly of violating Maryland law on the operations of charitable organizations, even as CCL accuses Big Oil of violating the common law of public nuisance. Whatever the legal realities of CCL’s operations, it is obvious that CCL is attempting to skirt the legal processes delineated in the constitution---actual legislation enacted by Congress and implemented by the executive branch---in its crusade against the oil industry. Not one of us will be safe if it succeeds.
SOURCE
AOC Gets Blasted by Legendary Environmentalist for Her Lies About Hurricanes & Global Warming
Bjorn Lomborg has been an environmentalist for decades. He’s also been fighting environmentalists for decades.
The Danish writer and academic has been putting environmentalists’ claims to the twin tests of reason and mathematics for over 20 years, and while the results have been overwhelmingly positive for the truth, they have been downright brutal for uninformed, emotional and often extreme green activists.
Over the weekend, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found herself in the dead center of Lomborg’s sights, a place no thinking person would ever want to be.
In response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Dorian, the Democratic wunderkind wrote, “This is what climate change looks like.”
The only problem is that that is decidedly not what climate change looks like. AOC’s postulation was wrong. Very wrong. And Lomborg was ready for her.
In response to AOC’s silliness, Lomborg wrote in the New York Post that “[there were] only three major hurricanes greater than a Category 3 to hit the continental US in the last 13 years. That’s a record low since 1900. For comparison, the average over the same timeframe has been nearly eight major hurricanes.”
If AOC actually wanted to show what alleged climate change looks like, she could have shown a picture of the Bahamas but also included pictures of other coastal locations that are flourishing, because we’re actually down five massive hurricanes from average.
Want to really blow a leftist environmentalist’s mind? Tell him he’s right about climate change but that it’s also producing fewer destructive hurricanes.
That poor leftist will melt down faster than if you had asked him to explain why homosexuality is hard-coded by biology but sex isn’t.
Want to take that even further? Accuse him of wanting more hurricanes. Because if he’s right that today’s climate is less desirable than yesterday’s, then he’s necessarily arguing that a world with more hurricanes is more desirable than a world with fewer.
Environmentalists might argue that a world with more but less damaging hurricanes would be better than a world with fewer but more damaging hurricanes.
The only problem is that that’s not likely to be true either.
Lomborg cedes the point that climate change — which he believes is happening — will likely make hurricanes stronger. But he follows that up by saying that “a major study in Nature showed hurricane damage today runs the world about 0.04 percent of GDP. Accounting for growth in prosperity (which means more resilience), by 2100 this would drop to 0.01 percent. And the effect of global warming making storms fewer but stronger will see damage end up around 0.02 percent.”
The point here that Lomborg doesn’t make (though to be fair it’s not the point he set out to make) is that Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk aren’t just wrong about climate change. They’re very wrong. They’re radically wrong.
Things are better now than they have ever been in the entire history of the planet. Every day 100,000 people are lifted out of the grinding poverty that has defined nearly all of human history. Those people will nurture new ideas, invent new technologies, produce new products and increase global wealth. Things will get better and things will continue getting better.
The question isn’t how we’ll deal with an impending climate disaster. The question is why in the world we are talking about crippling the capitalist system that’s rescuing people from poverty so that we can protect them from environmental disasters that will never happen.
If AOC actually wanted to help those suffering from deprivation and devastation, she would push for as purely capitalist a society as possible, because capitalism results in wealth and increased charity. It was during the 19th century — the time when America came as close as ever to pure free-market capitalism — that the greatest development of charity ever occurred, as Thomas Sowell has written.
But Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t actually care about lifting people out of poverty. She cares about sinking people into poverty — equally. That is the defining real-life attribute of socialism.
Its proponents may suggest socialism will result in wealth for all, but in practice, it results in brutal poverty for all, save a minute ruling elite. Yes, there’s equality, but it’s not equality in prosperity. It’s equality in poverty — every time.
Climate change somehow fueling killer hurricanes is a complete and utter fraud — just like AOC.
SOURCE
The Australian Energy Market Operator slashes output of five big solar farms by half due to voltage issues
The unstable output from them means their role has to be limited
The Australian Energy Market Operator has taken the dramatic move of slashing the allowable output from five solar farms in Victoria and NSW by half, because of issues over “system strength” that appear to have suddenly emerged.
The solar farms involved are Broken Hill in NSW, and the Karadoc, Wemen, Bannerton and Gannawarra solar farms in north west Victoria. The constraint limiting them to just half of their nominated capacity came into effect at 12pm on Friday
It is the latest in a series of blows to the solar industry, which has been afflicted by connection and commissioning delays, resulting in a blow out of costs and claims of damages to construction firms, as well as big changes to marginal loss factors, and the requirement for some to spend lots of money on synchronous condensers or other machinery.
To add to their woes, many solar farms in Queensland and South Australia have been forced to switch off during periods of negative pricing, either because they are required to do so under their off-take agreements, or because they are not willing to pay others to take their output over sustained periods.
Most of the solar farms affected by this latest ruling have been operating for some time – and in the case of the 53MW Broken Hill solar farm for four years. But it seems that the issue only emerged in a review just recently.
Some complained about the “blanket” approach to the constraints, but apparently it is difficult for AEMO to apply individual constraints in this instance. They wanted the issue resolved as soon as possible because of the potential revenue impacts. There is also concern about “contagion” into other regions.
The general market advice came in an oblique and typically coded market notice issued by AEMO just after 12pm. However, in a statement issued to stakeholders late Thursday, AEMO said it was working closely with a “number of solar farms” and network service providers to manage identified voltage fluctuations in north-west Victoria and NSW.
“Close analysis and management of this issue is required to ensure power system security across the associated parts of the Victorian and NSW 220kV electricity network,” it says.
“Until the fluctuations are resolved, AEMO will need to partially constrain the affected generators to manage power system security. AEMO has been working closely with all impacted generators, and anticipates an expedited remediation, reducing the impact and timeframe of required constraints.”
People involved say that the issue was raised in the last couple of weeks, and a solution is being worked on. But some expressed surprise the constraint was being imposed on solar installations that had been in operation for more than a year.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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13 September, 2019
It's Lightbulb Liberation Day
The Department of Energy is putting down its guns and withdrawing troops in the war on the incandescent bulb that began in 2007. It's pretty late in the day; the last factory to make them in the U.S. shut down in 2010. It's hard to find them in a store, in which case: thank goodness for Amazon!
Still, the damage can be reversed. Our houses can again be warm and beautiful, and legally. You can turn on the lights in the morning and not have your eyes lacerated by blindingly fake electric "light." As the Wall Street Journal summed up the current moment: "If you like old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs, you can keep buying them."
To be sure, the Trump administration is only rolling back the expansion of the ban to various specialty bulbs. The status quo ante is not yet restored. Still, this is a good move because it is a step toward consumer choice.
As a huge fan of Ayn Rand's short novel Anthem, the liberation of the light bulb means so much to me. It was published in 1937 but mostly drafted in the 1920s in Russia. In the dystopian story, a cruel government committee comes down hard on a young man who has re-discovered the light bulb. They condemn him for daring to think for himself and presuming to override the planned poverty of the social order. This society ruled by the total state is perfectly happy with its candles, and desires that no steps forward can be taken that are not explicitly approved by the ruling class.
Ayn Rand used the example of the light bulb because it is such a great symbol of the power of the human mind. It is within our power to harness the energy that comes from the heavens. "The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding," observes the Anthem protagonist. "There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask."
As Murray Rothbard observed, riffing on Rand's insight, the light bulb finally freed humanity from having to defer to the earth's rotations to determine work hours. It allowed night baseball, made our highways safer, and put civilization on a 24/7 basis. The light bulb means much more than what it is in its physical essence. It was the dawn of humankind's mastery of the world.
A few years ago, I was contemplating Rand's novel and looked up at my ceiling fan. Three glorious incandescent bulbs were lighting up the room in a warm glow. These particular bulbs lacked blue and white frosting. The glass was clear and the curved filament burned like a miniature flame. And yet that flame is caged and is made to be a servant of human dreams and aspirations.
The deeper story is about a thoroughly insidious attempt by bureaucracies together with a gaggle of politicians to ban the light bulb as we've always known it. In other words, it's the plot of Anthem lived in real time.
It all began with the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which called for a phaseout of the incandescent bulb by 2012 (variously amended by Congress to push out the deadline). The law banned light bulbs by wattage but not by name. In practice, it meant death for the kind of light we've enjoyed since the 19th century.
Gone from the shelves were the incandescent bulbs of 100 watts. Then it got worse as 40- and 60-watt incandescent light bulbs were killed off. Factories that once produced them were shut.
Once you dig more deeply, you find something remarkable: there was no scientific basis for this ban at all. Consider the ten-years ago analysis of Howard Brandston, a fellow of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America and the brains behind the refurbishment of the Statue of Liberty in the 1980s.
Brandston argued that the government's metric of lumens-per-watt was completely bogus. It doesn't consider the quality of light for a room. It doesn't consider the costs of making replacements or the environmental danger of more "efficient" bulbs (fluorescent bulbs contain mercury), and doesn't consider the whole reason we have lightbulbs to begin with: to light up a space. It focuses on one narrow point at the expense of all these broader considerations.
"The calculations used by the government and others promulgating or promoting the use of compact fluorescents," he said, "is strictly mathematical conjecture and has nothing to do with reality."
That rings true to me. So how can the consumer tell which are the best bulbs? Brandston says that a person's subjective judgment, tempered by a consideration of how long bulbs last, is more than enough. You don't need bureaucracies and you don't need experts.
But even if the new bulbs are awful, don't they save energy? Brandston said: "hoping that lighting is going to make a major contribution borders on ridiculous. .We'd be better off promoting occupancy sensors and dimming controls and recommending all dimmers be set to only provide 95 percent of the power to the light sources."
Why did the government do this to us? It fits with everything else about federal policy for the last 60 years. It seems to have put the goal of increasing human misery as a main policy goal. This is why our toilets, faucets, detergent, and washers have been wrecked with water-use controls-even though none of these policies make a significant difference in overall water usage. Just look at what government has done to our bathrooms.
It's why we are pushed to recycle even though no one has ever demonstrated that the mandates help the environment. It's why we are taxed on things we want to do like drive cars. It's why we can no longer medicate ourselves in normal ways without a doctor's permission. It's why we must endure hectoring lectures from public officials about fast food, sweets, and our trash generation.
What do all these policies have in common? They target things that we enjoy and that make our life better, then force on us inferior products and services. It's the penance we must do in the interest of the common good - and never mind whether the common good is actually enhanced in real life.
Which gets us back to Ayn Rand and the light bulb. She had a prophetic way of seeing the truth about government. She grew up under a regime that promised heaven on earth but ended up making a hell for everyone not part of the ruling class. She saw that governments could not produce imaginative goods and would eventually fall back on celebrating the poverty and destruction they cause - and inventing an ethic of sacrifice for the whole as a means of covering up their crimes. If you don't go along, you are an enemy of the people.
It's rather incredible that we have come full circle. Just as in Anthem, the U.S. government actually almost banned the light bulb as we've known it. Just think about the awesome implications of that and ask yourself why we put up with it.
On a personal note, my own dear mother replaced all her incandescents with fluorescents several years ago. I was sitting in her house feeling vaguely irritated by the searing lights in the room-cold and dreary-and had to turn them off.
Sitting in the dimly lit room, my thought was: This is what the government has done to us. A great invention from the dawn of modernity is being driven out of use. Do I have to bring my own candles next holiday season?
Why should governments be in the position of deciding what technologies can and cannot be used, as if consumers are too stupid to make such decisions for themselves? Who is to decide what is efficient, and what the proper tradeoff should be between the energy expended and the light produced? More fundamentally, why should governments be in the business of picking right and wrong technologies at all?
There is a grave cost to regulation and it's not just about freedom itself. It's about experimentation and innovation. A vast regulatory apparatus on cell phone technology in 1990 could never have imagined something like a modern smartphone. Regulations on digital commerce in 2000 might have stopped the rise of peer-to-peer services like Uber. Bitcoin is another example of a technology that blasted through the nationalization of money to show us something entirely new.
Indeed, one of the reasons that the digital world was so innovative until a few years ago was precisely because the regulators were not yet caught up with the pace of innovation. That's probably changing with the new antitrust push.
Regulations on technology freeze the status quo in place and make it permanent. In government, a ban is a ban, something to be enforced, not tweaked according to new discoveries and approaches. Regulatory interventions stop the progress of history by disabling the limitless possibilities of the human imagination.
We live in times without much good news in politics. Let's at least take the weekend to celebrate the embrace of progress, acquiescence to the wisdom of markets, the new freedom found for this hugely important symbol of humankind's triumph over the poverty of nature.
SOURCE
Are Category 5 hurricanes such as Dorian the `new normal'?-Asks Michael Mann
By Paul Homewood
Category 5 Hurricane Dorian tore through the Bahamas like a buzz saw last week, killing dozens of people and leaving a ruined, broken landscape.
It was the fifth Category 5 hurricane in the past four Atlantic hurricane seasons, joining other monsters such as Matthew, Irma, Maria and Michael, each of which left its own trail of death and destruction.
Is this part of a new trend? Could this be the "new normal"?
"I fear it's worse than that," Penn State University meteorologist Michael Mann said. "As we continue to warm the planet, hurricane intensities will increase further. There's no new normal. It's an ever-shifting baseline toward more destructive storms as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels and load the atmosphere with carbon pollution."
Fortunately we don't have to rely on Mann's propaganda, as instead we actually have the facts:
While he makes a big play about the five Cat 5s since 2016, he forgets to mention that there were none at all between 2008 and 2015.
It is not uncommon to have two such storms in the same year, as we did two years ago with Irma and Maria. The same thing happened in successive years in 1932 and 1933.
And there were six Cat 5s altogether in the 1930s, compared to five since 2010. (Touch wood, there will be no more this season- the current outlook is hurricane free).
And, of course, this all assumes that we are comparing like with like. How many Cat 5s were missed in the pre-satellite period? The National Hurricane Center have attempted to re-analyse storm data from the past, but large gaps in knowledge still remain.
This is what leading hurricane researcher Chris Landsea, of NOAA's National Hurricane Center, found in his 2012 paper, "On the Classification of Extreme Atlantic Hurricanes Utilizing Mid-Twentieth-Century Monitoring Capabilities":
To re-emphasise:
"It is found that likely only 2 of these 10-both Category 5 landfalling hurricanes-would have been recorded as Category 5 hurricanes if they had occurred during the late-1940s period."
I strongly suspect that of the five recent ones since 2012, Matthew, Irma, Maria, Michael and Dorian, only Michael would have been recorded as a Cat 5, as it was the only one to make US landfall at peak strength.
Michael knows bugger all about hurricanes, or little else about climate for that matter. His claim to fame is his widely discredited Hockey Stick, itself based on shonky statistics..
Yet the media regularly turn to him for any matters related to climate change. It was only a few months ago that he appeared on the BBC's Attenborough climate change programme, telling us how storms, floods and wildfires were worse than ever before. They were not and Mann had no especial knowledge about any of them.
If the BBC or US Today want to know about hurricanes, why don't they talk to proper experts in the field, such as Chris Landsea?
Maybe, it's because they won't get the answers they want.
SOURCE
Buckets of icy cold reality
Democrat presidential candidates and Green New Dealers need to face some hard energy facts
Paul Driessen
CNN recently hosted a seven-hour climate bore-athon. That climate cataclysms are real and already devastating our planet was not open to discussion. So host Wolf Blitzer and ten Democrat presidential contenders vied to make the most extravagant claims about how bad things are, and who would spend the most taxpayer money and impose the most Green New Deal rules to restrict our freedoms and transform our energy, economy, agriculture and transportation, in the name of preventing further cataclysms.
Cory Booker opened the bidding at $3 trillion. Kamala Harris and Julian Castro raised it to $10 trillion. Bernie Sanders upped it to $16 trillion. Then they got down to the business of telling us which personal choices and living standards they intend to roll back the furthest. Among the proposals:
Ban all commercial air travel (ruling and privileged classes presumably excepted). Change our dietary guidelines or ban beef outright. "Massively" increase taxes. "Make polluters pay" for emitting greenhouse gases. Eliminate onshore drilling, offshore drilling, fracking, coal-fired power plants, internal combustion engines. No new pipelines. In short, ban the fossil fuels that provide 80% of America's energy! No new nuclear power plants either. And then somehow, amid all that insanity, ensure "climate justice."
They need to be doused with a few buckets of icy cold reality. The first bucket: We do not face a climate emergency. Computer models certainly predict all kinds of catastrophes. But both the models and the increasingly hysterical assertions of planetary chaos are completely out of touch with reality.
The second, even colder bucket of reality: Wind and sunshine may be free, renewable, sustainable and eco-friendly. But the technologies, lands and raw materials required to harness this widely dispersed, intermittent, weather-dependent energy to benefit humanity absolutely are not. In fact, they cause far more environmental damage than any of the fossil fuel energy sources they would supposedly replace.
Biofuels. US ethanol quotas currently gobble up over 40% of America's corn - grown on cropland nearly the size of Iowa, to displace about 10% of America's gasoline. Corn ethanol also requires vast quantities of water, pesticides, fertilizers, natural gas, gasoline and diesel, to produce and transport a fuel that drives up food prices and thus adversely affects food aid and nutrition in poor nations, damages small engines, and gets one-third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline.
Replacing 100% of US gasoline with ethanol would require some 360 million acres of corn. That's more than twice the land area of Texas. But eliminating fossil fuel production means we'd also have to replace the oil and natural gas feed stocks required for pharmaceuticals, wind turbine blades, solar panel films, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers, and plastics for cell phones, computers, eyeglasses, car bodies and countless other products. That would require growing corn on almost four times the area of Texas.
Solar power. Solar panels on Nevada's Nellis Air Force Base generate a minuscule 15 megawatts of electricity, about 40% of the year, from 72,000 panels on 140 acres. Arizona's Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant generates 760 times more electricity, from less land, 90-95% of the time.
Generating Palo Verde's electricity output using Nellis technology would require acreage ten times larger than Washington, DC. And the solar panels would still provide electricity only 40% of the year.
Generating the 3.9 billion megawatt-hours that Americans consumed in 2018 would mean we would have to completely blanket over twelve million acres - half of Virginia - with solar panels, and get the Sun to shine at high-noon summertime Arizona intensity 24/7/365, wherever we install those panels.
Wind power. Mandated, subsidized wind energy likewise requires millions of acres for turbines and new transmission lines, and billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals and fiberglass.
Like solar panels, wind turbines produce intermittent, unreliable electricity that costs much more than coal, gas or nuclear electricity - once subsidies are removed - and must be backed up by fossil fuel generators that have to go from standby to full-power many times a day, very inefficiently, every time the wind stops blowing. Turbine blades already kill raptors, other birds and bats - perhaps a million or more every year in the USA alone. Their light flicker and infrasonic noise impair human health.
Modern coal and gas-fired power plants can generate 600 megawatts some 95% of the time from less than 300 acres. Indiana's Fowler Ridge wind farm also generates 600 megawatts - from 350 towering turbines, sprawling across more than 50,000 acres (much more than Washington, DC), less than 30% of the year.
Now let's suppose we're going to use wind power to replace those 3.9 billion megawatt-hours of US electricity consumption. Let's also suppose we're going to get rid of all those coal and gas-fired backup power plants, natural gas for home heating, coal and natural gas for factories, and gasoline-powered vehicles - and replace them all with wind-powered electricity. We'll also use wind turbines to generate enough extra electricity every windy day to charge batteries for just seven straight windless days.
That would require a lot of wind turbines, as we are forced to go into lower and lower quality wind locations. Instead of generating full nameplate power maybe one-third of the year, on average, they will do so only around 16% of the year. Instead of the 58,000 turbines we have now, the United States would need some 14 million turbines, each one 400 feet tall, each one capable of generating 1.8 megawatts at full capacity, when the wind is blowing at the proper speed.
Assuming an inadequate 15 acres apiece, those monster turbines would require some 225 million acres! That's well over twice the land area of California - without including transmission lines! Their bird-butchering blades would wipe out raptors, other birds and bats across vast stretches of America.
But every turbine really needs at least 50 acres of open space, and Fowler Ridge uses 120 acres per turbine. That works out to 750 million acres (ten times Arizona) - to 1,800 million acres (ten times Texas or nearly the entire Lower 48 United States)! Eagles, hawks, falcons, vultures, geese and other high-flying birds and bats would virtually disappear from our skies. Insects and vermin would proliferate.
Manufacturing those wind turbines would require something on the order of 4 billion tons of steel, copper and alloys for the towers and turbines; 8 billion tons of steel and concrete for the foundations; 4 million tons of rare earth metals for motors, magnets and other components; 1 billion tons of petroleum-based composites for the nacelle covers and turbine blades; and massive quantities of rock and gravel for millions of miles of access roads to the turbines. Connecting our wind farms and cities with high-voltage transmission lines would require still more raw materials - and more millions of acres.
All these raw materials must be mined, processed, smelted, manufactured into finished products, and shipped all over the world. They would require removing hundreds of billions of tons of earth and rock overburden - and crushing tens of billions of tons of ore - at hundreds of new mines and quarries.
Every step in this entire process would require massive amounts of fossil fuels, because wind turbines and solar panels cannot operate earth moving and mining equipment - or produce consistently high enough heat to melt silica, iron, copper, rare earth or other materials.
Not once did CNN's hosts or any of the Green New Deal presidential candidates so much as mention any of this. To them, "renewable" energy will just happen - like manna from Gaia, or beamed down from the Starship Enterprise.
They must no longer be allowed to dodge these issues, to go from assuming the climate is in crisis, to assuming "reliable, affordable, renewable, sustainable, eco-friendly" alternatives to fossil fuel (and nuclear) energy will just magically appear, or can simply be willed or subsidized into existence.
Citizens, newscasters, debate hosts and legislators who are more firmly grounded in reality need to confront Green New Dealers with hard questions and icy cold facts - and keep repeating them until candidates provide real answers. No more dissembling, obfuscation or incantations permitted.
Via email
'Progressives' Worship Nature at Altar of Climate Church
The only time progressive Democrats take a break from mocking, vilifying, and persecuting Christians is when they attempt to use the Bible to justify some element of their radical leftist agenda. In truth, though progressives claim to shun religion as the opiate of the masses (to quote their idol, Karl Marx), as a collective they actually practice a much more primitive form of religion than Christianity - a paganistic neo-Gaiaism in which they worship the Earth itself, rather than its Creator.
The earth is their goddess and their prophets are drawn from the political class. Remember Barack Obama claiming his nomination to the presidency would itself mark the day when the oceans would begin to recede and the earth would begin to heal? Please [ignore the hypocrisy of climate prophets like Al Gore and Obama living in massive mansions and traveling by private jet.
Recently, Democrat presidential candidate and self-proclaimed devout homosexual Christian Pete Buttigieg attempted to use scripture to justify Democrats' radical global-warming agenda, declaring, "To me, environmental stewardship isn't just about taking care of the planet; it's taking care of our neighbor. . And the biggest problem with climate change isn't just that it's going to hurt the planet . it's that we are hurting people."
He continued, "The way I see it, I don't imagine God's going to let us off the hook for abusing future generations, anymore than you would be off the hook for harming someone right next to you. With climate change, we're doing both."
God will punish us for "abusing future generations"?
Really? If God is going to punish us for driving gas-powered cars, cooling our homes with air conditioning, and drinking from plastic straws, we shudder to think how His wrath will be kindled when we are punished for the 60,000,000 (and counting) preborn children we've slaughtered in abortion clinics since 1973.
But Buttigieg says that abortion until birth is morally acceptable because "there's a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath."
Really? What parts might that be? Certainly not the Book of Jeremiah, where the Lord declares, "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee."
And it is hard to fathom God approving the death and dismemberment of an in utero John the Baptist, who "leaped" in the womb of Elizabeth, cousin to the Virgin Mary, when the preborn prophet heard the voice of the mother of the Son of God.
Democrats have long invoked Christ's admonition to care for the poor as justification for their massive income-redistribution programs. Yet Christ's exhortation that His disciples be charitable is an individual commandment, not a call for government programs.
Indeed, by definition, charity must be a voluntary individual act, done with cheerfulness. When the rich young ruler approached Christ, asking what he must do to have eternal life, Christ initially told him to keep the commandments. When the young man declared he had done so since his youth, Christ exhorted him to "go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor . and come and follow me." The young man, unwilling to give up his wealth, "went away sorrowful."
What didn't happen next? Christ didn't direct His disciples - or the Roman soldiers with legal authority - to accost the young man and take his wealth by force, and redistribute it to the poor and needy.
Democrats cheered heartily when the progressive Pope Francis claimed a religious imperative for open borders, but cast him aside when he condemned abortion.
This is why attempts by the "progressive" Left to co-opt the Bible to advance their political agenda fall flat. They not only don't truly believe what it says, they are actively hostile to its teachings. They use it simply as a political tool against religious conservatives.
The Bible teaches us that man is God's greatest creation, formed in His image. The Left believes we are an accident of evolution; the latest in a series of mutating species who once crawled out of the primordial slime. The Bible teaches us that man was given dominion over the earth, including the animals. The Left teaches human subjugation to nature.
The Bible commands us to "go forth, and multiply, and replenish the Earth." The Left calls for the self-annihilation of mankind so that the other species may thrive.
Mankind is God's greatest creation. God gave us self-awareness, reason, and emotion. He gave us an incredible intellect that has, in just a thousand years (a blink of an eye compared to the age of the earth), taken us from living in caves and huts, with lifespans of just a few decades, to a world where more information than is contained in all the earth's libraries fits in the palm of our hands; where we travel around the world in less than a day, and have lifespans now approaching a century.
If climate change is truly a problem, we'll solve it the same way we solved hunger, disease, and exposure to nature's fury - by harnessing the collective power of the God-created human mind.
The Bible is given to man for his salvation, a guide to eternal life in the kingdom of God. Those who seek to twist it for political gains should heed the words of Simon Peter, who declared, "They that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction."
SOURCE
Australian grape grower feels squeeze of the water traders
But there's plenty of water to send straight out to sea for "environmental" reasons
Third-generation farmer Peter Barry has raised citrus and grapes in South Australia's Riverland all his life, and the decision he made last week broke his heart.
He turned off irrigation water to 10 of the 100ha he farms with his wife, Mary, near Loxton, being patches of vines that produce -cabernet sauvignon, gordo and chardonnay.
"They'll die," Mr Barry said, his voice quavering. "It's quite an emotional thing because we are at the end of our tether."
Mr Barry said he had spent $500,000 replanting in recent years, but there was just no way he could make a profit off those vines with irrigation water prices where they are, at $800 a megalitre on the spot market, compared with a long-term average of about $135 a megalitre.
"I spend $10,000 to water a section of chardonnay, and that chardonnay returns me $8000 or $9000," he said. "I would not get a return on those patches."
Mr Barry has some entitlements to what is known as high-security water, but needs to buy much more on the tradeable secondary market to keep his horticulture going.
Drought, the federal government buybacks of water from irrigators and large plantings of permanent crops such as almonds have all reduced the amount of tradeable water in the Murray-Darling system, and pushed up prices. Like many farmers, Mr Barry thinks there's more than that going on, something sinister perpetrated by water investors who don't own land and don't grow a radish, but play the market, hoard water and, he says, push up prices.
"It's shocking," Mr Barry said. "People are owning this water and are just using it to make money, while we won't make a cent. "We are at the beck and call of investment companies."
With water prices as they are, many cotton farmers are just not putting in a crop, and some are selling their water to other farmers such as Mr Barry who have permanent crops that may die if not watered.
"He just leaves his tractor in the shed and earns a million -dollars selling water to me," Mr Barry said of such a cotton-grower scenario.
More tough decisions face Mr Barry.
He said he might soon have to also "turn off" young citrus trees he planted only a couple of years ago that are too young to produce fruit because he can't afford to water anything that doesn't produce an immediate return.
He may also have to put the two full-time employees who have worked for him for 30 years on to part-time work.
SOURCE
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12 September, 2019
"Climate Change" Is A Hoax
Kurt Schlichter
I hate science, evidently, because I'm woke to the manifest truth about what the leftist elite currently calls "climate change." It is the second most staggering fraud ever perpetrated upon the American people after the media's promotion of the unstoppable candidacy of Beto (who is a furry). Like some suckers still do, I once believed that "science" was a rigorous process where you tested theories and revised those theories in response to objective evidence. But in today's shabby practice, "science" is just a package of self-serving lies buttressing the transnational liberal elite's preferred narrative. Our alleged betters hope that labeling their propaganda "science" will science-shame you into silence about what everyone knows is a scam.
Nah. "Climate change" is a hoax. Come arrest me for felony denial.
Understand that the term "climate change" does not refer to actual meteorological phenomena but, rather, to the sordid rat-king of lies, scams and power grabs that we are commanded to accept as pagan gospel lest we burn to a crisp or drown or suffer...whatever the Armageddon du jour is. When you say "climate change is a grift," and you should as often as possible, you are pointing out that this green-on-the-outside/red-on-the-inside fake frenzy is really just a set of intertwined grifts transparently designed to separate you from your freedom and your property in the name of somehow adjusting the weather.
Observing that "climate change" is steaming garbage served in a dirty ashtray is not disputing that the climate changes. That the climate is not static, and never could be static, is one of the myriad reasons that this whole idea is ridiculous. The planet gets hotter, it gets colder, sometimes quickly, sometimes over eons, and there are a bunch of reasons why, like the sun and volcanos. Human-produced carbon might be one of the factors, but there's simply no evidence that it is a significant one. Of course, if they really cared about carbon, they would be up in arms about China and India, which are upping their output while we are slashing ours. Yet the object of their ire is your New York strip. Gosh, does that seem consistent with 1) someone truly concerned about atmospheric carbon, or 2) someone who trembles with joy at the notion of bossing around you rubes out in gun/Jesusland?
The underlying premise of their claims seems to be that there is a "right" temperature for the earth; watch them sputter when you enquire about that perfect setting for Earth's thermostat. Remember, if you ask questions you hate "science." If they did stop telling you how you hate "science" long enough to respond, they might explain that of course there's no perfect temperature - it's not like LA, where it's always 72 degrees.
But then, what are they comparing the present climate to in order to declare that our climate is "getting worse?" If you establish a climate baseline, then you can compare what's actually happening to the baseline and that might demonstrate that the whole thing is baloney. That would be awkward. It happened after Katrina. Oh, Katrina's proof positive that Gaia is really ticked off and.and.and.then we had a bunch of years without much hurricane action at all. You might think that this would be evidence that maybe the climate wasn't in chaos, and that they would be happy to be proven wrong, but no, it doesn't work that way. Every time the weather fits the narrative, you see, it's proof that the climate kooks are right, and every time the weather fails to fit the narrative, well, weather's not climate. At least until the next heat wave or storm; then weather will totally be climate again.
Heads, you must give us all your freedom and money, and also tails, you must give us all your freedom and money.
Now, we're being told that we're all going to die in.I guess we're down to what? About 11.5 years this go `round? Of course, we've been told many times that we're doomed and the deadlines have come and gone with the doomsdayers not missing a beat. They're like old timey Elmer Gantrys promising the apocalypse over and over again, with their hardcore true believers regularly showing up for the rapture over and over again no matter how many times the Four Horseman fail to turn up.
We haven't even seen one horseman.
Back in the 70s, I remember we were promised an ice age if we didn't give liberals our money and freedom. Then in the 80s, we were promised death by ozone hole if we didn't give liberals our money and freedom, and then doom by acid rain if we didn't give liberals our money and freedom. By the time they started promising that we were all gonna die from global warming if we didn't give liberals our money and freedom, I was still wanting my ice age. It would be nice to have a white Christmas in LA.
So, where's my damn ice age?
Oh right, only a climate denier - Climate, I deny thee! - might wonder why we should hand over one, ten, a hundred trillion bucks to people who have never once been right about their predictions. You evidently hate "science" if you expect the "science" people to be correct at least one time in a half-century.
And they're not even good at short-term prognostication. Heck, for several days Hurricane Dorian was supposed to slam head on into Florida and then.it didn't. The Obamas just bought a $15 million pad on the beach - what's that say about their faith in "science?" But don't worry, the guys batting .000 so far will definitely get the temperature in 2119 right if we only just write them a huge check and transform ourselves from citizens to serfs.
That's another big red flag - have you noticed how "science" always tells us that the only possible response to the climate hullabaloo is to give liberals exactly what they always wanted anyway? How lucky are the leftists to have had an existential problem drop in their laps where the only solution is to give them everything they could not otherwise convince us to give them? What a remarkable coincidence!
And what's also weird is how nothing that we must do right now no time to debate it's a crisis think o' the children in any way inconveniences or calls for sacrifices from our climate crisis-pushing elite. Boy, they really scored with climate change - if they were going to manufacture a crisis in order to get the power and money they craved, how would they do it any differently?
Now, they might claim that they too will have to sacrifice to the Angry Weather Demon, but it's unclear how. I suppose they might stop flying across the globe to climate finger-wagging festivals in private jets, but call me jaded for thinking that if it's such a crisis today and they have not stopped doing it yet, they won't stop jetting about down the road. Oh, but you will. You most definitely will stop flying and driving the vehicles you choose and eating cheeseburgers and using straws that don't disintegrate into gummy sludge in your Dr. Pepper. But them? Pete Buttigieg explained away his zipping around in Gulfstreams as necessary because it is important for him to be pestering people in Des Moines. Bet you that pretty much everything our betters want to do will turn out to be "important." And I'll bet that nothing what you peasants want to do will.
One might think that if stopping carbon was important, you might want to explore nuclear power. But you would think wrong. After all, if there's plenty of electrical power, the elite loses the political power that comes from divvying up a scarce resource. If they control the power, they control you. Cheap, plentiful power makes you freer, which is a bug, not a feature.
Oh, and those many millions of people in Middle America who directly or indirectly rely on fracking and the rest of the fossil fuel industry? Even bloody-eyed, Gaffe-atronic Joe 3000 wants to shaft you. Better learn to code or something, because your good job is history. Weird how all the sacrifice once again falls on those out in the hinterlands and not on the blue coastal city swells, huh? But you'll be able to rest easy knowing that our moral superiors in Brooklyn and Alexandria and Santa Monica enjoyed showing you sweaty rubes who's really the boss by impoverishing you. Because that, and not the weather in a century, is and always has been what the "climate change" hoax is really all about.
If you want to read a vivid account of what happens if the Democrats succeed and manage to enslave us through weather inquisitions or disarming those of us who don't commit crimes or however, check out my action-packed yet hilarious novels, People's Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire. People you despise for being cruise-shilling grifter dweebs called these tomes "appalling." Can there be a greater endorsement?
SOURCE
Democrats Once Again Embrace Population Control to Save the Planet
Is the left once again embracing Malthusian population control in order to save the planet?
Of all the preposterous proposals put forward by the Democratic presidential candidates during the CNN climate change town hall meeting last week, the dumbest wasn't outlawing plastic straws, incandescent light bulbs or air travel. It wasn't the contention that climate change is the globe's greatest threat since World War II. It wasn't even the fantastical hypothesis that hurricanes are racist because they target "communities of color" more than white areas.
No, the dumbest (and most dangerous) idea was a rehash of the widely discredited authoritarian idea from the 1960s and `70s: population control. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked by a schoolteacher whether it would even be possible to fight global warming given that "the world's population has doubled over the last 50 years." Would the senator be "courageous enough to discuss curbing population growth" as part of his climate plan? Sanders obediently blurted out "absolutely, yes" and then meandered into a discussion about a woman's right to choose and better access to birth control.
Here we go again. In the 1960s, biologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford became the patron saint of the modern population control movement with his mega-bestseller "The Population Bomb." That book - which argued that the world was overpopulated by more than 1 billion people and the only way to save the planet from environmental doomsday was to force people to have fewer children - became the rallying cry for Stalinistic population control measures around the world. This led to tens of millions of forced abortions, involuntary sterilization programs, forced contraception and even homicidal infanticide - all in the name of saving the planet.
China took the population control crusade to a whole new level when it instituted its notorious one-child policy. To this day, there are tens of millions of females demographically missing in China. The homicidal environmental policy was cheered on by the United Nations and many of the same left-wing activists and organizations that preach "reproductive freedom" and women's rights. Similarly brutish population control programs were implemented in Africa, India, Egypt and many South American nations. To save the planet, babies had to be prevented.
Fortunately, scholars like the late Julian Simon of the University of Illinois proved that human beings do not deplete the world's resources but help discover and create them. A larger number of human beings - especially when combined with freedom and free enterprise - leave the planet materially and environmentally better off, not worse off.
Simon also showed that freedom and prosperity are the best forms of contraception. Population growth happened because we found ways to conquer early death - with infant mortality rates falling by 70% and 80% - and eradicate killer diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis.
The Malthusians were not just immoral; they were dead wrong on their population projections.
All of those population forecasting models that predicted standing room only on the planet over the next 25 to 50 years were lies. In the 1970s, the left predicted today's population would be more than 10 billion people. The number is closer to 7.5 billion. These doomsday demographic models of the future were about as accurate as the climate change models predicting catastrophic temperature changes.
What the population control crowd didn't see happening was that population growth has radically slowed down - and not because of government edicts. As people get richer and freer, couples have chosen to have fewer - but healthier - children. Today, in most countries, including China, the tragedy is not too many children but too few.
But at its core, the radical greens really do believe that the fundamental problem with the human race is that there are too many of us. People are the pollution. Celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Prince Harry are urging people to have fewer or no kids. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wondered earlier this year whether young women should feel ethically bound not to have children so as to help prevent climate change. At the end of the day, she rejected that lunacy, but the very idea that liberals had to ask the question shows how anti-human the left has become.
This is a fundamentally anti-Judeo-Christian ideology that disrespects human life and - as history proves all too well - can lead to dastardly consequences for basic human rights and economic progress. In regard to environmental problems and the constantly changing climate of our planet, human ingenuity is the solution, not the cause.
SOURCE
Don't Overhype the Link between Climate Change and Hurricanes
By JUDITH CURRY
Doing so erodes scientific credibility - and distracts from the urgent need to shore up our vulnerability to storms' impacts.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian's catastrophic impacts on the Bahamas, we have been reminded of the inevitability that some aspect of any damaging hurricane will be blamed on man-made climate change.
We first saw this after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, with the publication of two papers linking an increase in the strongest hurricanes to increasing sea-surface temperatures. As co-author of one these papers, I was astonished to see the outsize media and public attention that they garnered. Katrina was the first time people realized that a small amount of warming could have substantial adverse impacts. Since then, each hurricane has been viewed as an opportunity by activists to emphasize the urgent need to reduce fossil-fuel emissions.
Katrina also touched off an intense and publicly acrimonious debate among hurricane scientists about the quality of hurricane-intensity data and the effect of man-made climate change. "We anticipate that it may take another decade for observations to clarify the situation," I wrote of the controversy in 2006. Since then, research on the climate dynamics of hurricanes has grown in leaps and bounds. But there remains substantial scientific debate surrounding the issue of hurricanes and climate change.
In 2013, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that:
Globally, there is low confidence in attribution of changes in tropical cyclone activity to human influence. This is due to insufficient observational evidence, lack of physical understanding of the links between anthropogenic drivers of climate and tropical cyclone activity, and the low level of agreement between studies as to the relative importance of [natural variability and man-made forcing].
Last month, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Task Force, consisting of eleven international experts on hurricanes and climate change, published two assessment reports. Unlike the IPCC's, which focus on consensus statements, the WMO reports discussed disagreement among the authors, distinguishing the issues on which there was substantial agreement among the authors from those on which there was substantial disagreement owing in part to limited evidence.
Any convincing claim that man-made climate change has altered hurricane activity requires identifying a change in hurricane characteristics that can't be explained by natural climate variability. The only conclusion on which there was high agreement among the WMO Task Team members was that there is low-to-medium confidence that the location of typhoons in the North Pacific has changed as a result of climate change. The team members disagreed as to whether any other observed alterations in hurricane activity could be said to have been discernibly influenced by man-made climate change.
The WMO reports discussed a number of more speculative statements about the relationship between hurricane behavior and climate change, which could very well be false and overstate the influence of man-made climate change. There is some evidence suggesting contributions from man-made climate change to: an increase in the average intensity of the strongest hurricanes since the early 1980s; an increase in the proportion of hurricanes reaching Category 4 or 5 in recent decades; and the increased frequency of Hurricane Harvey-like extreme precipitation events in the Texas region. There is also evidence suggesting a decrease in how fast hurricanes move, but that has not been attributed to man-made climate change with any confidence. The WMO Report states that there is disagreement among the authors about whether these trends reflect the influence of man-made climate change.
Why, then, is there so much hype about man-made climate change in the news media after every catastrophic hurricane? Rather than referencing these assessment reports, sensationalized news coverage of the issue tends to lean on activist climate scientists with little or no expertise in hurricanes, implying that their speculative perspective represents the "consensus."
Insofar as there is any such "consensus," it is a weak one. Climate and hurricane scientists continue to have a range of perspectives on the impact of man-made climate change on hurricanes. The frequent disagreements among them help move the debate forward, adding to our collective scientific knowledge of the issues involved for everyone's benefit.
My own perspective is described in a comprehensive Special Report on Hurricanes and Climate Change that was prepared for the clients of my company, Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN). My report is broadly consistent with the WMO's assessment reports, but maintains a greater focus on aspects of hurricanes that contribute to landfall impacts and on the role of natural climate variability in explaining the observed variability of hurricanes and their impacts.
All measures of Atlantic hurricane activity have increased since 1970, although comparably high levels of activity occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, and higher levels of activity were seen in the first decades of the 20th century. Of the 13 strongest recorded hurricanes to hit the U.S. mainland, only three have occurred since 1970: Andrew (1992), Charley (2004), and Michael (2018). Four of these 13 hurricanes - including the strongest, the Labor Day hurricane that hit Florida in 1935 - occurred between 1926 and 1935, when sea-surface temperatures were substantially cooler than they've been in recent decades. Hence it is difficult to support an argument that man-made climate change, which has been significant only since 1970, is making hurricanes worse.
Predictions of future hurricane activity are even more uncertain. Possible scenarios in which hurricanes could incrementally worsen over the course of the 21st century are described in the WMO Report. But they don't change the fundamental fact that hurricanes become catastrophes through a combination of large populations, land-use practices and coastal-ecosystem degradation.
My recent testimony to the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee described ways that we can reduce vulnerability to hurricanes. Rapidly escalating hurricane damage in recent decades owes much to government policies that subsidize risk. The most politically important hurricane that you have probably never heard of is the Category 3 Hurricane Frederic, which struck Alabama and Mississippi in 1979. Its landfall occurred shortly after FEMA was established, and prompted almost $250 million in federal aid for recovery. In 1992, following Hurricane Andrew, Robert Sheets, the then-director of the National Hurricane Center, testified to Congress that the aid for Frederic's recovery had spurred development in the hurricane-prone regions of the Gulf Coast. Federal disaster policies provide humanitarian benefits, but also encourage the growth of regions vulnerable to hurricanes, which can make the damage from future storms worse. The political pressure on state insurance regulators that often holds down insurance premiums in risky coastal areas contributes to the problem, as well.
It does no one any good to proceed on the assumption that reducing fossil-fuel emissions will mitigate damage from future hurricanes in a meaningful way. The hype that links today's hurricanes to man-made climate change is diverting our attention from implementing policies that can reduce our vulnerability to hurricanes, which by some measures were worse prior to 1970. These policies include fixing our federal disaster policies and state insurance policies, making better land-use decisions, improving building codes and coastal engineering, hardening infrastructure, and protecting coastal wetlands.
Overselling the possible effect of man-made climate change on hurricane impacts not only risks eroding scientific credibility, but also distracts from addressing our vulnerability to the storms themselves.
SOURCE
The Electoral College is affirmative action for rural areas? I wish
The big cities are imposing their values on rural areas with very little restraint
Purposefully, I have lived my adult life in rural Oregon because of the beautiful mountains, forests, and quiet deserts, where along with family and friends I have hiked and boated in remote areas and enjoyed the peace and beauty of rural life.
When Representative Ocasio-Cortez tweets that the Electoral College is "affirmative action" for rural Americans, I take great umbrage. To the contrary, because of the concentration of the voting power vested in big cities and states, the federal government and (in my case) the State of Oregon have dominating and disproportional powers and control over the lives and conditions of rural Americans.
Just one example: In Oregon, the federal government controls over 54 percent of the land. The management of the federal forests (there are many) is deplorable and dangerous. Subject to the political pressures by environmental organizations and their demand for old-growth forests, the forests for many years have not been properly thinned and cleared of debris and dead trees, which has resulted in deadly fires throughout the American West.
Equally devastating, the environmental movement has severely reduced logging on federal land; since 1989 the timber harvest on federal lands has been reduced by 90 percent. Besides convincing Congress and the federal bureaucrats to restrict logging, the environmental organizations have consistently and repeatedly stopped good management and harvesting by perpetual litigation in federal and state courts. Again, the voting power in big cities and states has enormously reduced the jobs and economies of rural America.
Most rural governments depend on property taxes to fund schools and local government. However, the federal government by law cannot be taxed on their lands. When the federal government owns over 59 percent of land in my county, it obviously hurts local government and especially schools. But the federal government has a solution - Payment in Lieu of Taxes. That sounds nice and sometimes it is. However, it is only a law and has been threatened to be withheld if the rural counties do not support desired legislation, as occurred when the Republicans' leadership threatened rural county commissioners with reducing Payment in Lieu of Taxes unless the Commissioners supported the corrupt Export-Import Bank legislation of 2015.
Thus, when Representative Ocasio-Cortez, tweeted that the Electoral College is "affirmative action" for rural Americans, she went beyond the repulsive but common political obfuscation to purposeful deceit.
SOURCE
Cheap US energy leads Australian company to OK mill expansion in Ohio, not Australia
US energy prices just one-third of those in Australia, along with a robust manufacturing sector stoked by President Donald Trump's policies, have prompted a $1 billion expansion of an Ohio steel mill by BlueScope.
BlueScope chief executive Mr Vassella said the $1 billion expansion of the North Star mill, to be fully up and running by 2023, was the largest capital investment the steelmaker would likely ever make, and would deliver annual returns of 15 per cent-plus.
He said the company had intimate knowledge of the mill because it helped build it in the first place in the mid-1990s in a joint venture with North American group Cargill, and had moved to full ownership in 2015.
Mr Vassella lamented the state of Australian manufacturing as the sector battled high energy prices and said one of the main drivers of the North Star expansion, which will increase capacity by 40 per cent, was that energy costs in the United States were substantially lower.
"That's a tragedy quite frankly for Australian manufacturing,'' Mr Vassella said.
BlueScope also operates the Port Kembla steelworks in New South Wales, which underwent major cost-cutting and restructuring in 2015. Mr Vassella said he worried a lot about manufacturers in Australia who were BlueScope's customers and were facing ''demand destruction'' because their energy costs were too high.
Mr Vassella is also making a bet on the economic policies of Mr Trump, which had been a positive for domestic US industry. North Star's main customers are in the automotive and construction industries and 95 per cent of them are within a 350km radius of the North Star mill. "The mood in the US is pretty good,'' Mr Vassella said.
He emphasised there had been a year of detailed planning and number-crunching prior to the board giving the go-ahead for the expansion. "We're not frivolous with this sort of money,'' Mr Vassella said.
"This is a 30-year investment. What I'd say about North Star is that we built this asset. We know the business really well. I think it allows us to feel very confident about the return profile.''
Mr Vassella also promised shareholders that BlueScope wouldn't end up as one of the big Australian companies which make a mess of major investments overseas.
Wesfarmers squandered billions on a flawed expansion into the United Kingdom hardware market in a big bet, rather than the steady incremental growth which BlueScope had been pursuing.
The expansion green light on Monday came as BlueScope produced a full-year net profit of $1.02 billion and a continuation of a share buyback of up to $250 million.
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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11 September, 2019
Dem contenders rally around a carbon tax, may soon regret it
Paul Mirengoff
I believe that all of the leading Democratic candidates for president have endorsed a carbon tax. Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren did so during CNN’s town hall on climate change last week. Down a tier or two, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg endorsed it, as well. Bernie Sanders has endorsed a carbon tax in the past.
The carbon tax was a bridge too far for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. She did not endorse the idea. Nor did President Obama.
Americans for Tax Reform directs our attention to an internal Clinton campaign memo on the subject. The memo sets forth the serious disadvantages of a carbon tax.
First, the cost of the carbon tax would be passed on to consumers:
While oil, natural gas, and coal companies would be responsible for paying the fee, they would likely pass a significant share of the associated cost on to their customers.
Second, a carbon tax would have a disproportionate impact on low-income households:
As with the increase in energy costs, the increase in the cost of nonenergy goods and services would disproportionately impact low-income households.
The memo quantifies the effect of the tax on gas and electricity prices:
In our analysis, for example, a $42/ton GHG fee increases gasoline prices by roughly 40 cents per gallon on average between 2020 and 2030 and residential electricity prices by 2.6 cents per kWh, 12% and 21% above levels projected in the EIA’s 2014 Annual Energy Outlook respectively.
It does the same for household energy bills:
Average household energy costs would increase by roughly $480 per year, or 10% relative to the levels projected in EIA’s 2014 Outlook.
In addition:
The Hillary memo states that a carbon tax would increase the cost of household goods and services: “The cost of other household goods and services would increase as well as companies pass forward the higher energy costs paid to produce those goods and services on to consumers.
Not surprisingly, the carbon tax is unpopular with voters. Indeed, Americans for Tax Reform notes that carbon tax advocates haven’t been able to get a carbon tax passed in a single blue state.
No wonder. Ramesh Ponnuru points to a poll that found 68 percent of Americans opposed to paying even $10 extra in their monthly utility bills to address climate change, even though most Americans believe it’s occurring and that human activity is responsible.
Yet, in their quest to satisfy the Democratic left, the leading Dem contenders all seem to favor a carbon tax.
Whichever one of these luminaries wins the nomination will be saddled with that position. He or she will have some explaining to do.
SOURCE
Ship of Fools VI - Arctic `Global Warming' Mission Scuppered By Mysterious Hard White Substance
Yet another greenie expedition to the Arctic to raise awareness of `global warming' has been scuppered by unexpected large quantities of ice. This brings to a total of six the number of Ship of Fools expeditions where weather reality has made a mockery of climate theory. According to Maritime Bulletin:
Arctic tours ship MS MALMO with 16 passengers on board got stuck in ice on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen, Svalbard Archipelago, halfway between Norway and North Pole. The ship is on Arctic tour with Climate Change documentary film team, and tourists, concerned with Climate Change and melting Arctic ice. All 16 Climate Change warriors were evacuated by helicopter in challenging conditions, all are safe. 7 crew remains on board, waiting for Coast Guard ship assistance.
The reporter, Erofey Schkvarkin clearly has a sense of humour. He adds: "Something is very wrong with Arctic ice, instead of melting as ordered by UN/IPCC, it captured the ship with Climate Change Warriors."
Here is the Ship of Fools list of shame
Ship of Fools 1 Australian climate researcher Chris Turkey and a crew of climate alarmists on a mission to demonstrate just how much Antarctic ice has been affected by global warming get stuck in unexpectedly thick ice and have to be rescued by helicopter.
Ship of Fools II Arctic expedition led by veteran explorer David Hempleman-Adams to raise awareness of "permanent irreversible change in the sea ice landscape of the Arctic" caused by global warming is ruined by unexpectedly large quantities of ice.
Ship of Fools III Global warming research study in Canada cancelled because of ice. "It became clear to me very quickly that these weren't just heavy ice conditions, these were unprecedented ice conditions" claims the lead scientist, blaming it on "climate change fully in action" and calling it "a wake up call for all of us in this country."
Ship of Fools IV Arctic Mission sailing expedition to North Pole to raise awareness of global warming has to turn back after yachts find their passage blocked by large quantities of unexpected frozen white substance.
Ship of Fools V Scientists, students, filmmakers from University of Rhode Island's Inner Space Center on a mission to "document climate change effects" in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago have to be rescued after the ship is damaged after grounding on unexpected hard, bluey-white substance floating on the sea.
Do you think someone up there is trying to tell these people something?
SOURCE
Obama-era "Waters of the United States" Orwellian EPA tyranny finally ruled unconstitutional
Private property rights were challenged time and time again during the Obama Administration. The Obama Administration used both the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as weapons to steal property from individuals and to convert state land over to the ownership of an all-powerful federal government. Many would argue that this plot was influenced by the United Nation's (U.N.) Agenda 21, which was sold under the guise of "sustainable development" of natural resources - an idea that Obama sympathized with.
As law and order is restored under the Trump Administration and as state sovereignty is respected again, judges are declaring these land grabbing, Obama-era rules unconstitutional while restoring the private property rights of individuals and returning land back to the states.
Court strikes down Obama's sweeping land grab as unconstitutional
Under Obama, the EPA adopted the "waters of the United States" (WOTUS) rule to violate state sovereignty. The rule allowed the federal government jurisdiction over all property that is adjacent to any body of water. By the end of the torrid Obama administration, ten states had begun to challenge Obama's land grab maneuver. U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood has ruled that Obama arrogantly disregarded the constitutional balance of powers between the states and the federal government.
Wood wrote, "The court finds that both because of its combination with tributaries and the selection of over-broad geographic limits without showing a significant nexus, the adjacent waters definition in the WOTUS rule is unlawful under Justice Kennedy's Rapanos opinion."
"Most importantly," Wood states, "that significant increase in jurisdiction takes land and water falling traditionally under the states' authority and transfers them to federal authority."
She adds, "In light of this significant intrusion on traditional state authority, the CWA still contains the policy language of recognizing traditional state power in this area, and Congress has not made any clear or manifest statement to authorize intrusion into that traditional state power since Rapanos."
The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) was excited about the new ruling. "The court ruling is clear affirmation of exactly what we have been saying for the past five years," AFBF General Counsel Ellen Steen said. "The EPA badly misread Supreme Court precedent. It encroached on the traditional powers of the states and simply ignored basic principles of the Administrative Procedure Act when it issued this unlawful regulation."
Obama's WOTUS rule violates the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which requires that no "private property be taken for public use, with- out just compensation." Obama's unconstitutional land grab resulted in the persecution of rural private property owners in multiple states. The WOTUS rule gave the EPA sweeping power to dictate what property owners could do on their own property. Some property owners were attacked by the federal government for simply building ponds, irrigating, or collecting rainwater. Under Obama's tyranny, landowners were forced to spend thousands of dollars on legal fees and submit to federal permitting just to start a project on their own land.
SOURCE
CNN's Presidential Climate Change Town Hall Was Insane
And the hysteria is getting dangerous
Put it this way: the most benign climate-change plan proposed during CNN's seven-hour Democratic Party presidential candidate town hall was more authoritarian than anything Donald Trump has ever suggested during his presidency. Democrats were not merely proposing massive societal upheaval but mass coercion.
CNN says it's a "crisis," though, so Democrats were free to offer one insane Nostradamus-like prediction after the next. Not only is every weather event now a manifestation of global warming, but Beto O'Rourke says our communities will soon be "uninhabitable," and Pete Buttigieg says the challenge of warming is on par with World War II, a conflict that took more than 400,000 American lives and tens of millions of others.
None of this hysteria, as far as I can tell, was challenged during those seven hours.
As Joel Pollak notes, at this point climate change "is primarily experienced as a mass hysteria phenomenon," a collective illusion of a massive threat. Just listen to audience members earnestly asking questions based on the risible premise that we're on the brink of extinction. It's really one of the tragedies of our age that so many anxious young people have been brainwashed into believing they live on the cusp of dystopia when, in fact, they're in the middle of a golden age - an era with less war, sickness, poverty, and suffering than any in history.
When Joe Biden, the "moderate" front-runner, was asked by CNN's Anderson Cooper if the Green New Deal - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's unifying climate plan that bans all fossil fuels, 99 percent of cars and planes, and meat within the next decade - "goes too far," or whether it was "unrealistic, promising too much" ("promising," of course, suggests that GND's goals are desirable), he answered, "No, no it's not."
In fact, the Green New Deal - which also promises to "retrofit" every building in the entire country and provide government-guaranteed jobs, free higher education, and salubrious diets to all Americans - "deserves an enormous amount of credit," said the front-running candidate of the nation's serious party.
And though the most effective way to lower carbon emissions - the one that allows us to outpace signees of the vaunted Paris Accord - has been fracking, most Democrats, it seems, now oppose that as well.
Candidate Elizabeth Warren, who's now adopted Jay Inslee's plan to force every American to surrender fossil fuel and nuclear energy in 20 years, claims solar panels are the way forward. To put this in perspective, remember that natural gas makes up about 23 percent of our energy consumption while renewables make up about 11 percent. Only 8 percent of that 11 percent is solar energy - much of it both already subsidized and mandated by government.
Americans use about 19.96 million barrels of petroleum products per day. To replace it, we'd have to create millions of unproductive taxpayer-funded jobs, layer every inch of available land with solar panels and windmills, and then pray to Gaia that every day is simultaneously sunny and windy. All for the low cost of $93 trillion.
How? The "norms of democracy" crowd hasn't yet chimed in on Sen. Kamala Harris' contention that she would reach across the aisle and demand Republicans pass her plan; and then, if they didn't, alter the entire U.S. economy via executive action and get rid of the Senate filibuster - which will now be within her power, I guess, since we're in a crisis.
Then again, when you're in a crisis, all kinds of ugly things seem reasonable. Take the anti-humanism that's long been connected to environmentalism.
One town hall audience member asked the bureaucrat Juli n Castro if our children should "continue the cycle of family." Can you imagine being so taken in by a Malthusian panic that you're seriously pondering whether perpetuating mankind is a good idea?
Abortion, of course, has been a part of environmentalist plans for a long time. When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she "thought that at the time Roe (v. Wade) was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of," she was right.
It's no accident that Al Gore argued that we "have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management" in the developing world as a way of controlling population to stop climate change. The Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups have long warned us that too many babies in Africa and Asia will destroy the Earth. "The Population Bomb" is widely accepted by environmentalists, although its chief prophets have long been discredited.
"Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years. The planet cannot sustain this growth," one CNN audience member told Bernie Sanders, who agreed, promising to back more U.S. funding for abortions in the developing world. Sanders believes women in Asia and Africa should abort their babies to save the world while he shuttles between his main house and one of his two dachas.
Sanders opposes the two greatest antidotes to poverty and suffering: affordable energy and capitalism. And others are now following him.
You might not believe Democrats' efforts are particularly dangerous, since they're mostly unworkable. But sooner or later, converts to utopianism are going to start demanding that rhetoric, which is always ratcheting up to new apocalyptic heights, align with policy. That's dangerous.
SOURCE
Analysis finds that Google not only discriminates against conservatives but also anyone who challenges the "climate change" hoax
A new analysis notes that search and tech behemoth Google is not only working to suppress conservative voices and opinions, but also anyone who disputes the Left-wing "climate change" hoax, which is really nothing more than an attack on capitalism.
That's a problem, writes David Wojick for Capitol Hill Outsider, because Google's market dominance is such that it essentially qualifies as a "monopoly" on the kind of information the public is allowed to see.
And monopolies, according to U.S. law, are illegal. Here's some background.
On July 2, 1890, after Congress passed the Sherman AntiTrust Act, President Benjamin Harrison signed it into law, thereby creating the first federal legislation outlawing monopolistic business practices.
Named after Sen. John Sherman of Ohio, a onetime chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and Secretary of the Treasury under President Rutherford B. Hayes, the law was designed to enhance competition among American businesses and corporations and prohibit single firms from completely dominating an industry or economic sector.
"The Sherman Act authorized the Federal Government to institute proceedings against trusts in order to dissolve them," according to this government website. But because the law loosely defined key terms like "trust," "conspiracy," and "monopoly," it was eventually "dismantled" by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But that wasn't the end of the law. Presidents and administrations have used it frequently since to bust up real-life monopolies including Standard Oil, the American Tobacco Co., and - as recently as the 1990s - the Microsoft Corp.
Now, argues Wojick, Google - which The Washington Times notes dominates the online `search' function with more than 92 percent of traffic - constitutes a monopoly on information that must be broken up.
He notes that several months ago Google released a white paper titled, "How Google Fights Disinformation." While that sounds like a noble cause, because the tech giant "is a decidedly Left-wing outfit," it classifies as "disinformation" conservative views and "things like skepticism of climate alarmism."
He also says that Google's search results when it comes to topics or news stories favor "authoritative sources" which the algorithm has been designed to identify as "mainstream" media, "which are almost entirely liberal."
And since these are the biggest news sites, Google's algorithm essentially filters out any site that is smaller and not as well-read, regardless of the validity of its content. That means conservative sites who argue against the climate change narrative are screened out intentionally.
As The National Sentinel reported in February 2017, a former U.N. official actually admitted in a private setting that the objective of pushing the `climate change' narrative was to destroy individual liberties and capitalism. But anyone challenging the Left's version of climate change - that it's real and it's going to destroy the planet unless we all give up our modern lives - is suppressed. Wojick notes.
While conducting research in 2018, Wojick documented extreme bias when he searched for "dangerous manmade global warming" information.
"My individual searches on prominent skeptics of alarmist claims revealed that Google's `authoritative source' was an obscure website called DeSmogBlog, whose claim to fame is posting nasty negative dossiers on skeptics, including me and several colleagues," he wrote.
While conducting searches, Wojick found three things:
- Google linked to DeSmogBlog's dossier on the skeptic though the information often was years old or "wildly inaccurate."
- About half of the results consisted of links to negative attacks, "which should not be surprising, since the liberal press often attacks us as skeptics."
- Climate skeptics are very often described as being "funded by Big Oil," whereas funding of climate alarmists by "self-interested government agencies," renewable energy companies and far-Left climate figures like Tom Steyer were "generally ignored."
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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10 September, 2019
There is NO climate emergency!
Climate models predict disaster - but real world evidence shows no such thing
Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris
Speaking at the 13th International Conference on Climate Change, held July 25 in Washington, DC, Dr. Roy W. Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville said: "There is no climate crisis. Even if all the warming we've seen in any observational dataset is due to increasing CO2 (carbon dioxide), which I don't believe it is, it's probably too small for any person to feel in their lifetime."
And yet, that same month, Democrat Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Earl Blumenauer and Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a non-binding resolution that demands a "national, social, industrial and economic mobilization" - to "halt, reverse, mitigate and prepare for the consequences of the climate emergency, and to restore the climate for future generations." Six Democrat presidential candidates immediately supported the resolution, as a way to spur "sweeping reforms" to stem a "dangerous rise in global temperatures."
In their view, apparently, asserting a climate emergency makes it a reality and justifies national or even global control and transformation of our energy, social, industrial, economic, legal and social systems.
Thus, in an effort to drum up support for its costly "carbon tax," the Liberal government of Canada has also declared a climate emergency. So has Britain's Parliament, to back up a call by opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for "rapid and dramatic action" to protect the environment , following weeks of protests by the Extinction Rebellion climate movement, the Reuters News Agency reported.
The Climate Mobilization group proclaimed that "Over 790 local governments in 17 countries have declared a climate emergency and committed to action to drive down emissions at emergency speed."
In considering whether this makes any sense, let's take a page out of Blumenauer's book and, as he put it, "tell the truth about the nature of this threat."
The so-called emergency is based on nothing but the over-active imaginations of activists who put too much faith in computer model forecasts, while ignoring historic records and observational data that tell us nothing extraordinary or unprecedented is happening - and demonstrate that the models are wrong.
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies asserts that between 1880 and 2017 there has been only slightly more than 1 degree C (1.8 F) rise in the so-called global average temperature, despite a supposed 40% rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database of state-wide extreme weather records, arguably the best of its kind in the world, shows that so far in 2019 only one weather record has been set: the lowest temperature in Illinois history.
In 2018, the only records set were: the largest hailstone in Alabama history; the most rainfall in a 24-hour period in Hawaii; and the most precipitation in one year in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia. Many of these records broke, sometimes barely, records that had stood for many decades.
In 2017, the only record set was for the fastest wind gust in California. No records were set in 2016. In 2015, only two records: the most precipitation in a year in Arkansas and the largest hailstone in Illinois history. In 2014, only one record: the most rainfall in a 24-hour period in New York.
And so it goes, year after year, as we move into the past with the occasional state record set, as one would expect due to natural climate variability. In the first 18+ years of the 21st century, only two states recorded their maximum temperatures: South Carolina in 2012 and South Dakota in 2006. Contrast that with 1936, when 15 states set their all-time maximum temperature records.
Meanwhile, NOAA's updated coastal sea level tide gauge data for 2016 show no evidence that the rate of sea level rise is accelerating. Seas are rising no faster than they have for many decades.
NOAA's hurricane records go back to 1851. The data show that for almost 12 consecutive years - October 24, 2005 (after Wilma) until August 25, 2017 (Harvey) - not one major or moderate (Category 3-5) hurricane made landfall in the continental United States. That is the longest such period in history. In 2018, for the first time ever, not one "violent" (F4-5) tornado touched down in the United States.
To the great frustration of climate alarmists, the real-world instrumental record clearly shows that, not only is no climate emergency underway, but today's climate is actually quite stable. Aside from the drive for world socialism, the climate scare is based on only one thing: computer model forecasts of what some say could happen someday if we do not restrict our use of fossil fuels to reduce CO2 emissions.
However, the models do not work. That's because they focus predominantly on greenhouse gases, and because scientists do not understand planetary climate processes well enough to know what mathematical equations to program into the models. Observations demonstrate that the actual rate of warming between 1979 and 2017 is one-third of what the average of 102 different climate models predicted. In fact, that climate model average is now almost one full degree Fahrenheit above what satellites have measured!
It is also important to realize that your own local weather forecasts just one week ahead are accurate only half the time. Let's drill a bit deeper into this scandal.
For the better part of three decades, governments have financed more than one hundred efforts to model our planet. They continue to do so even though none of the models has been able to recreate (hindcast) the known past, or after a decade of study accurately predict what was to happen just ten years later.
People are led astray, because generally speaking, the public has no clue what mathematical models actually are, how they work, and what they can and cannot do. To provide a simple insight into this complex subject, before we build airplanes or buildings, we make small scale physical models and test them against the stress and performances that will be required of them when they are actually built.
When dealing with systems that are totally beyond our control, we try to describe them with computer programs or mathematical equations that we hope may give answers to questions we have about how the system works today and in the future. We attempt to understand the variables that affect the system's operation. Then we alter the variables and see how the outcomes are affected. This is called sensitivity testing and is the very best use of mathematical models.
Historically, we were never foolish enough to make economic decisions based on predictions calculated from equations we think might control how nature works. Perhaps the most active area for mathematical modeling is the economy and stock market. No one has ever succeeded in getting it right, and they have far fewer variables than Earth's climate, which is governed by many powerful natural forces.
Yet, today, in the climate sphere, we are doing just that - and using the models to justify massive changes in our energy and economic systems. While no one knows all the variables affecting climate, there are likely hundreds of them. Here are some important factors for which we have limited understanding:
1) seasonal, annual and decadal changes in solar irradiation; 2) energy flows between the ocean and atmosphere; 3) energy flows between the air and land; 4) balance between Earth's water, water vapor and ice; 5) the impacts of clouds, both trapping heat below and preventing solar radiation from reaching Earth; 6) understanding the planet's ice; 7) changes in mass among ice sheets, seal levels and glaciers; 8) our ability to factor in hurricanes and tornadoes; 9) the impact of vegetation on temperature; 10) tectonic movements on ocean bottoms; 11) differential rotation between Earth's surface and its core; and 12) solar system magnetic field and gravitational interactions.
Despite this vast uncertainty, today's modelers claim they can forecast our planet's climate for decades or even a century in the future - by looking primarily or solely at "greenhouse gases." And they want our leaders to manage our energy, economic, agricultural, transportation and other systems accordingly.
Yes, there is a climate-related emergency. It is the threat to our way of life in the free democratic world - imposed on us by climate alarmists, many of whom do not really care about climate change, people or the environment. It is an assault no less frightening and damaging than the wars that have plagued mankind since the dawn of time. It's time for people and governments to stand up to the power-hungry alarmists.
Via email
5 Surprising Scientific Facts about Earth's Climate
There are many environmental facts that run contrary to popular belief. Here are five of them.
On the weekend of August 10-11, as if in chorus, major online news websites called on people to stop consuming meat. The calls echoed a recent United Nations report that recommended doing so to fight climate change.
It surprised many, but there are other more surprising facts about climate change that are hardly published in our everyday news media.
Below are some facts-scientifically recognized and published in peer-reviewed journals-that may raise your eyebrows.
1. Climate Has Always Changed-Always
All proxy temperature data sets reveal that there have been cyclical changes in climate in the past 10,000 years. There is not a single climate scientist who denies this well-established fact. It doesn't matter what your position on the causes and magnitude and danger (or not) of current climate change is-you have to be on board on this one. Climate has always changed. And it has changed in both directions, hot and cold. Until at least the 17th century, all these changes occurred when almost all humans were hunters, gatherers, and farmers.
2. Temperature Increase in the Past Was Not Caused by Humans
Industrialization did not happen until the 17th century. Therefore, no prior changes in climate were driven by human emissions of carbon dioxide. In the last 2,000 years alone, global temperatures rose at least twice (around the 1st and 10th centuries) to levels very similar to today's, and neither of those warm periods were caused by humans.
3. The Arctic and Antarctic Are Doing Better than Ever!
Yes, you read that right. The 10,000-year Holocene paleoclimatology records reveal that both the Arctic and Antarctic are in some of their healthiest states. The only better period for the poles was the 17th century, during the Little Ice Age, when the ice mass levels were higher than today's. For the larger part of the past 10,000 years, the ice mass levels were lower than today's. Despite huge losses in recent decades, ice mass levels are at or near their historic highs.
4. Polar Bears and Other Species Are Not Dying But Flourishing!
If you paid attention to the previous fact, then the following one is not hard to understand. Polar bears-often used as a symbol of climate doomsday-are one of the key species in the Arctic. Contrary to the hype surrounding their extinction fear, the population numbers have actually increased in the past two decades.
Last year, the Canadian government considered increasing polar bear killing quotas as their increasing numbers posed a threat to the Inuit communities living in the Nunavut area.
The increase in population size flies in the face of those who continue to claim otherwise in the popular news media. And it is not just the polar bears in the Arctic. Other critical species elsewhere, like tigers, are also making a comeback.
5. Carbon Dioxide Is Not a Temperature Control Knob
While most of the current climatologists who collaborate with the United Nations believe anthropogenic CO2 emissions have exacerbated natural warming in recent decades, there is no empirical proof to support their claim. The only way to test it would be to wait and see if their assumptions come true.
The entire climate fraternity was in for a surprise when global temperature between 2000 and 2016 failed to rise as anticipated by the climate alarmists. The scientists assumed that rising CO2 emissions from human activity would result in a rapid rise in temperature, but they didn't.
This proved that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are not the primary factor controlling global temperature. Consideration of a much longer period (10,000 or more years) suggests that CO2 had no significant role to play in temperature increases. CO2 never was the temperature control knob.
It would be na‹ve not to acknowledge this blatant and lopsided reporting in our news media.
These are some of the many climate facts that the media refuses to acknowledge, like the impending solar minimum that NASA has predicted for the next two solar cycles between 2021 and 2041, ushering in a period of global cooling like it did during the solar minimum of 17th century.
There are other facts that run contrary to popular belief, such that there has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, droughts, or other extreme weather events. Even the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported low confidence that global warming-manmade or not-was driving increases in extreme weather events.
The list is endless. It would be na‹ve not to acknowledge this blatant and lopsided reporting in our news media.
SOURCE
Heiress Aileen Getty, 62, has pledged œ487,000 to the Climate Emergency Fund
Dimwit
An oil heiress has donated nearly œ500,000 to a fund which backs Extinction Rebellion, claiming that 'disruption' is needed for there to be action on climate change.
Aileen Getty, 62, pledged œ487,000 to the Climate Emergency Fund and said that the move is not 'necessarily restitution' for the fortune her family made.
Ms Getty, who is the granddaughter of the tycoon J Paul Getty, said that she hopes other high-net individuals will also donate to the CEF, reports the Telegraph.
She said: 'Whether the resources I have come from oil or not, I feel an urgency and it's a privilege to give whatever resources you have.'
Ms Getty told the Times that Extinction Rebellion protests are 'necessary because it is evident the public still is not sufficiently engaged.'
The mother-of-two, who was married to actress Elizabeth Taylor's son Chirstopher Wilding, also said she believes people are 'complicit' if they don't act on climate change.
She explained how 'most of us have the information at our fingertips' and will eventually have to answer to future generations.
The oil heiress, who is still flying but is 'willing' to change her travel habits, said Greta Thunberg was one of her inspirations.
She said: 'I'm willing to drop everything that needs to be dropped in order to arrive at a more equitable future for us all.'
When asked about the expansion at Heathrow airport, Ms Getty said she disagreed and a spokeman later clarified that she didn't support disrupting flights.
A group calling themselves Heathrow Pause have said that they are willing to go to jail over plans to ground flights from the airport from September 13.
Scotland Yard said they are 'deploying an effective policing plan' to detect illegal activity, although admitted the drone-based protest brought 'unique challenges'.
It comes as Heathrow officials met with the activists but were left 'disappointed' by the group's plans to still carry out the action.
Extinction Rebellion originally came up with the idea of using drones to shut down Heathrow over the summer.
But it abandoned its plans after facing a backlash from police, ministers and MPs which accused it of putting lives at risk.
The CEF donated œ283,000 to Extinction Rebellion this week in its first payment to the group.
Last week Extinction Rebellion activists wreaked misery on drivers in Manchester by barricading main roads as part of a four-day 'uprising'.
The climate campaigners wheeled a large boat reading 'planet before profit' into the normally busy Deansgate crossroads.
The demonstrators reportedly chose to occupy this particular junction owing to its allegedly unlawful levels of air pollution.
It mirrors the protests earlier this year in London which resulted in the crippling of the capital's transport routes and saw more than a thousand arrests.
Aileen Getty is the second child of Sir John Paul Getty and Abigail Harris. Her brother Jean Paul III was kidnapped in the 1970s.
Ms Getty contracted HIV from an affair and has worked for several years to raise HIV-awareness, reports the Times.
The Gettys are the 56th richest family in the United State, with a net worth of $5.4 billion, according to Forbes.
SOURCE
NASA GISS Surface Station Temperature Trends Based On Sheer Guess Work, Made-Up Data, Says Japanese Climate Expert
Whenever NASA GISS announces how recent global temperatures are much hotter than, for example, 100 years ago, just how statistically reliable are such statements?
Most will agree, based mainly on sundry observations, that today is indeed warmer than it was when surface temperatures began to be recorded back in 1880. But we will never really know by how much.
Surface station datasets full of gigantic voids
When we look at NASA GISS's site here, we can see how many surface stations have data going back to earlier years. Today we see that 2089 stations are at work in Version 3 unadjusted data.
Yet, when we go back 100 years (to 1919), we see only 997 of these surface stations have Version 3 unadjusted data that is complete:
Note how the Version 3 unadjusted datasets going back to 1919 are poorly distributed and sorrowfully lacking over Africa, Canada, the Arctic and all across the Southern Hemisphere. Never mind the oceans.
Only a measly 174 surface stations go back to 1880!
And when we look at the number of stations in Version 3 unadjusted data going back to 1880, ONLY 174 stations actually provide us with a complete thermometer dataset:
As is shown, Version 3 unadjusted data going back to 1880 covers only some parts of the US and Europe. All of Canada and Russia are void of data, and so it is impossible to know what the temperatures there really was.
The same is true for the entire southern hemisphere, let alone the entire globe. The bottom line: There is no way of knowing what the global temperature really was back in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
This tells us that global temperature trends since the start of the Industrial Revolutions presented by NASA are fraught with huge uncertainty.
"This is nothing new," says Japanese climate expert Dr. Mototaka Nakamura in an email to NTZ. "We simply did not have many observing stations in the 1800s and early 1900s. They can produce `new data sets' and claim that they have `better data sets' all day long, but they just can't make any meaningful difference for periods up to 1980."
"Not real data"
"These datasets are products of simulation models and data assimilation software, not real data," Dr. Nakamura added. "This problem has been present in data products produced by all institutions from the beginning - NASA, NOAA, NCEP, ECMWF, UMet, etc."
"Spatial bias before 1980 cannot be dealt with"
But the data shortcomings get even worse. Dr. Nakamura wrote: "A far more serious issue with calculating `the global mean surface temperature trend' is the acute spatial bias in the observation stations. There is nothing they can do about this either. No matter what they do with the simulation models and data assimilation programs, this spatial bias before 1980 cannot be dealt with in any meaningful way. Just look at the locations of the observation stations used in GISS products for various years on their page."
Dr. Nakamura commented earlier here at NTZ: "The global surface mean temperature change data no longer have any scientific value and are nothing except a propaganda tool to the public."
So how can we be sure about the globe's temperatures, and thus it's trends before 1980? You can't. The real data just aren't there.
SOURCE
GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Four current articles below
Power pricing overhaul `should reward coal'
Coal-fired power plants face being pushed out of Australia's power grid earlier than forecast by negative daytime spot prices, sparking a call fora redesign of the national electricity market to prevent blackouts and ensure security of supply.
The Australian Energy Market Operator said dramatic spot price falls into negative territory this week, driven by cheap solar and wind, underlined the need to reset the market. It wants to introduce a new price mechanism reflecting the important reliability role provided by power stations, which are currently struggling to receive any value for their generation when they are undercut by renewables that can produce at close to zero cost
"We really do need to start thinking about putting in markets for firming," AEMO chief executive Audrey Zibelman said on the sidelines of a CEDA event. 'What we've been seeing in the last week is the fact that energy itself, because of renewables, can be at zero or even less than zero. "Unless we get the markets right - and we continue to see the emergence of rooftop solar as well as variable renewable energy - we'll see even earlier coal retirements than anticipated because the economics of plants won't be viable.
"What I would hate to see happen is that the plants actually re-tire earlier than we anticipate and suddenly we're not ready."
Zero and negative pricing in electricity spot markets is becoming more common and reflects a profound shift in the grid with growing solar and wind supply. The spot price of wholesale electricity traded at zero in every eastern Australian state at the same time in July. Since then prolonged periods of negative prices at minus $1000 per megawatt hour have now spread from being relatively common in renewables-reliant South Australia to emerging as a new feature in Queensland's market this week, due to a solar surge and transmission constraints.
That has highlighted a conundrum for dispatchable generators. "These power plants, as we've been seeing the last few days when you've had negative pricing, that wasn't because the cost of en-ergy was negative or zero, it was because we weren't paying for reliability, the firming capacity, the way we should," Ms Zibelman said.
"We need to start recognising that resources that provide that important dispatchability need to be paid for differently than resources that are just providing energy."
Coal stations like EnergyAustralia's Yallourn unit in Victoria's Latrobe Valley are already operating under a cloud, with the state's high renewable targets and cuts to emissions threatening to force the plant to close earlier than its 2032 target.
The threat of losing baseload or dispatchable power earlier than forecast could lead to load shedding or even blackouts, given the tight market at periods of peak demand. Separate markets for firming generation and a similar system to Germany's reserve power market could help with the clan energy transition. If the market design works, power prices should ultimately fall to reflect the new zero cost trend for solar and wind.
"I think you would need multiple markets to really get the value for the type of resources we want," Ms Zibelman said. "The idea now is not one generator is able to provide everything, which is what we had with traditional fossil fuels. But it's understanding the portfolio so traditional units are paid for the value they supply
SOURCE
State refusing to let coal mine expand
State government delays in approval for expansion of the New Acland Coal Mine will likely see'it close within 18 months, costing 300 jobs, writes Michael Madliati
The decision (or, more to the point, the absence of a decision) by the State Government on the mining licence required for the expansion of the New Acland Coal Mine this week has left Andy and 300 other co-workers in limbo.
A lot of these people working in this "thin seam" coalmine operating for more than a century, and featuring thin ribbons of coal threaded through the earth as little as one metre high, don't have too many options. Many are specialised in this area of work, and there are not a lot of coal mines in the south-east to migrate to.
They can't just go off to another mine, as workers might in Queensland's Bowen Basin where massive thick seam operations which can tower over 60m are common, and hundreds of workers required.
Mine manager Dave O'Dwyer had the unenviable role of telling a large portion of them who started at the 6am shift Monday that 300 out of the mine's 300 jobs had to be cut by October.
O'Dwyer, who in recent months believed he had good reason to think the planned mine expansion was on track for approval, was clearly shaken. "I was really looking forward to getting up in front of them and talking about how our future was bright and prosperous and we would just move forward," he said.
Instead, he was greeted with a sea of blank faces as he told of the cuts, and workers began going through the mental arithmetic of how to celebrate Christmas minus a pay cheque. "As you look around the room there is just deadly silence," O'Dwyer said.
The expansion was expected to be given the green light by midnight Saturday and was the fulfilment of a process which began before the first ever iPhone came out. New Hope began jumping through the hoops to expand the mine in 2007 and has altered the application several times
Objectors have taken them to the Land Court, won, then to a New Hope (owners of the mine) appeal, when a Judicial Review ruled against the objectors's case and found the mining lease should be granted
Meanwhile objectors went back and appealed New Hope's successful appeal of the first decision, and the government won't the mining lease and associated water licence until that decision is finalised.
The State Govemment can, quite legally, green light the mining company's expansion and let it sort out its legal problems down the track while also bearing 'associated costs. But it won't, and that reluctance to get behind the expansion of a proven mining project utterly baffles O'Dwyer.
If Federal Labor had won the May federal election, New Hope might at least have been able to tailor their expectations and ambitions to a new 'anti coal' electoral mood. But Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk moved swiftly to change the mood in the State after the election which, in Queensland, was dearly fought over the Adani Mine proposal in Central Queensland.
The Premier jetted off to Mackay just days after the election and announced she would direct the Co-ordinator-' General to sit down with the Environment Department and Adani to get thing moving. Labor then put the resources industry front and centre at its State Conference last month
The Courier-Mail: 2019-09-07
Tonnes of reusable garbage sit in huge warehouse destined for landfill
Recycling finally revealed as a hoax. Glass, steel and aluminium are recyclable but the rest is a nonsense
Thousands of tonnes of reusable waste could be soon dumped in landfill despite having been recycled correctly by residents more than two years ago.
Almost 10,000 tonnes of reusable garbage has been sitting in a Victorian warehouse since 2016 - and the company tasked with helping to process it, SKM Recycling, has gone under.
And that figure is only from one of five huge warehouses in Laverton, Victoria, piled with unprocessed plastics, papers and cardboard.
Carly Whitington, a landlord at one of the warehouses, told A Current Affair if the issue wasn't addressed soon, the waste would end up in landfill.
As it stands Australia only reuses 12 per cent of its recycled rubbish, which puts it on par with South East Asian countries but far behind European nations.
Tasman Logistics Services director Craig Morris said China making moves to reduce the level of Australia's waste it takes was a huge factor in the crisis.
'Once China started making noises about reducing the amount of waste they were going to take, I think alarm bells should have been going off at high levels at that point,' he said.
The owners of the warehouses said they were in limbo on how to tackle the problem until they received guidance from the council or the state government.
Victorian Minister for the Environment, Lily D'Ambrosio, released a statement regarding the possibility of the recycled waste going to landfill. 'Sending recyclable material to landfill is always a last resort, but in some instances it may be a safer option than allowing materials to be stockpiled,' she said. 'Community safety must come first.'
SKM Recycling was tasked with processing the waste, but the company went out of business in August. However the Victorian State Government loaned $10 million to SKM's receivers KordaMentha to 'help clean up the stockpiles on SKM sites'.
'Clearing these waste stockpiles is the first step in making these sites safe and getting them up and running again,' Environment Minister Lily D'Ambrosio told The Age.
'Sending material to landfill is always a last resort and that's why we want to see processing begin when it is safe to do so.'
SKM group manager Bryan Webster said the $10million loan had to be used to clear as much of the plastics as they could - and it would all be going to landfill.
SOURCE
Australia's green energy target won't be increased - but the country is set to hit goal of nearly a quarter of electricity coming from renewable sources
Australia's renewable energy target of less than one-quarter of all electricity generation won't be increased, the minister responsible has declared.
Australia is on track to achieve next year's target due to four large wind and solar power projects recently given the green light.
Under the target, 33,000 gigawatt-hours - or 23.5 per cent - of Australia's electricity will come from renewable sources by 2020.
The target was slashed in 2015 under the Abbott government from 41,000 gigawatt hours, with the support of Energy Minister Angus Taylor, who says it was too high.
'Those targets won't be increased, and the reason is very simple, it's because the economics of this is working fine now,' he told ABC Radio on Wednesday.
Mr Taylor says the boost in renewable energy has created a new challenge for the electricity system, fearing summer blackouts if there's not enough baseload power.
He says expanding the Snowy Hydro scheme, developing a second interconnector between Tasmania and the mainland, and the Apple Isle's 'Battery of the Nation' vision are all high priorities.
'These are crucial investments to get the balance in the system, that is the key now.'
Mr Taylor admits there is 'no question' the cost of energy from wind and solar are low, arguing this proves there's no longer a need for a renewable energy target.
The Morrison government is yet to announce what projects will receive taxpayer support through its underwriting of investments in power generation.
A shortlist of 12 projects was announced ahead of the federal election in May, which the coalition was expected to lose.
Mr Taylor says some projects will cost billions of dollars, and a final announcement has not been made, as he wants to ensure taxpayer money is well spent.
Labor went to the federal election with a 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, which is now being reviewed.
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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9 September, 2019
The Misogyny of Climate Deniers (?)
The article below draws heavily on work by Chalmers university figures so I was interested to find out a bit about the quality of the thinking of people who think that climate skeptics are nuts. The article is from TNR so is solidly Leftist.
It starts out with a huge diatribe against critics of Greta Thunberg, the autistic Swedish teenager who has become a sort of oracle to many on the Left. Conservatives do not at all understand the devotion to Thunberg. She appears to know nothing about climate science or much else so why has she made such an impression?
The answer is simple. It is an example of the desperate Leftist search for alternatives to conventional Western wisdom. As part of that search, primitive religions are often glorified by the Left as some sort of alternative revelation to Christianity -- culminating in the risible reverence for the fictional Chief Seattle. Thunberg is just another example of claiming to find wisdom that is outside conventional sources.
Anyway, the author below, Martin Gelin, is outraged at the mockery his Leftist goddess has attracted from the more rational end of the population and concludes that it can only be explained as the result of "misogyny". That it might result from her being off her noggin, he does not consider.
I do not reproduce that part of his article below. I start with his coverage of research from the Chalmers fraternity.
It is pathetic research. Initially below Gelin refers to a paper by Anshelm and Hultman. But that paper is based on a content analysis of speech in a focus group. So what is wrong with that? Just about everything. I have in my own research career worked with content analysis so know where the skeletons are buried. The basic truth of content analysis is that it is highly subjective.
You can take all sorts of precautions to impose some degree of objectivity on your analyses but you are always up against the fact that different auditors will hear different things in the speech concerned. And where the auditors have preconceived notions and theories about what is there, you will almost always confirm those notions and theories. And since the Chalmers people clearly did have adverse opinions of skeptics, it was foreordained that they would find that skeptics are a bad lot.
Had they been even a pale mockery of scientists, content analysis is exactly the research method the Chalmers crew would have avoided -- on the grounds that their known biases would render their work worthless. There are research methods -- such as Likert scales -- that are inherently less likely to be biased by preconceptions and it is those methods which they should have used if they wanted any degree of scientific respectibilty
The second paper our TNR guy refers to is not paper at all. It is a book chapter and not even an abstract of it is available online. There is however a review of it here and from the review it would appear to be a work of theory only.
The final paper that our TNR guy refers to is one headed: "Men Resist Green Behavior as Unmanly"
Probably because it is. It is emotional rather than logical.
Feminists routinely claim that the environment is a feminist issue. There's a whole Wikipedia article on it. So for the authors to have shown anything new, they would have to have established that there was no prior polarization between the sexes on environmental issues. They did not do that, probably because they could not.
But describing something as feminine is a long way from condemning it. It is a long way from misogyny. A lot of men really like women. I am one.
So on all grounds the accusation that climate skeptics are misogynists falls flat for lack of evidence.
In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: "for climate skeptics . it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity."
The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me-an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality-Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement-and now climate activism's challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.
"There is a package of values and behaviors connected to a form of masculinity that I call `industrial breadwinner masculinity.' They see the world as separated between humans and nature. They believe humans are obliged to use nature and its resources to make products out of them. And they have a risk perception that nature will tolerate all types of waste. It's a risk perception that doesn't think of nature as vulnerable and as something that is possible to be destroyed. For them, economic growth is more important than the environment" Hultman told Deutsche Welle last year.
The corollary to this is that climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized-or viewed as "oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy," Hultman and fellow researcher Paul Pul‚ wrote in another paper.
These findings align with similar ones in the United States, where there is a massive gender gap in views on climate change, and many men perceive climate activism as inherently feminine, according to research published in 2017. "In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag-regardless of whether the shopper was a male or female," marketing professors Aaron R. Brough and James E.B. Wilkie explained at Scientific American. "In another experiment, participants perceived themselves to be more feminine after recalling a time when they did something good versus bad for the environment," they write.
In the past year, young women such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. and Thunberg in Europe have become the global faces of climate activism, often with tremendous political impact. In the United States, Ocasio-Cortez has helped transform what was once considered a bit of fringe rhetoric-the Green New Deal-into a topic of regular conversation. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in a recent poll, one out of three Germans said that Thunberg has changed their views on climate change.
SOURCE
Climate Change a Convenient Excuse for Dems to Transform Economy
"Climate change is an existential crisis," Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared Tuesday, unveiling her plan to fight climate change in advance of CNN's interminable townhall event on the topic with 10 Democratic presidential candidates.
The use of the term "existential crisis" is ironic. No doubt, they mean "existential threat," i.e. that global warming threatens to end life on Earth. It doesn't. But we'll get back to that in a second.
The term existential crisis comes from psychology or philosophy, not environmental science. An existential crisis is when you're overcome with panic or dread about your place in the world or your purpose in the universe. If you're depressed and ask, "What's it all about?" you might be having an existential crisis.
A giant asteroid barreling toward Earth is an existential threat, midlife adultery is a sign of an existential crisis.
The irony is that concern over climate change - which is a real and legitimate concern - seems more derived from an existential crisis than an existential threat.
At the CNN event, many of the Democratic candidates insisted that life on Earth was at stake. Warren said climate change is an "existential threat" that "threatens all life on this planet." According to Sen. Bernie Sanders, "We are dealing with what the scientists call an existential threat to this planet, and we must respond aggressively; we must listen to the scientists. That is what our plan does."
That's not true. Our quality of life on Earth might be threatened, but our existence isn't. Now, of course, something can come up far short of an extinction-level event and still be really, really bad. But the idea that all life on this planet is in jeopardy if America doesn't wean itself from fossil fuels is just hyperbole. And even if America did exactly that, there's little reason to believe the rest of the world would follow suit.
Still, if we take them literally, not just seriously, they're saying we're doomed if we don't implement some version of the Green New Deal - a sweeping, wildly expensive, hodgepodge of proposals first unveiled by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that aims to eliminate carbon emissions inside of 12 years.
And yet, both Sanders and Warren (and others) are against using nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions. "In my administration, we won't be building new nuclear plants," Warren declared. "We will start weaning ourselves off nuclear and replace it with renewables," by 2035. Sanders called nuclear power a "false solution" and vowed to end it.
It's an odd argument. Sanders says we must "listen to the scientists," but there are scads of scientists who think nuclear waste storage is eminently manageable, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. They report that the "consensus" is that safe geological storage is entirely feasible.
More importantly, if you honestly believe that climate change is an existential threat, akin to an impending asteroid strike, why would you rule out one of the only proven tools to combat it? It's a bit like refusing to use a firehose on a burning orphanage because you're afraid of the subsequent water damage.
There are plenty of people who despise nuclear weapons and want to see them eradicated. But it would be hard to take such people seriously if they argued against sending nuclear missiles into deep space to head off an extinction-level asteroid impact.
All the Green New Deal proposals are sold as huge economic bonanzas, offering lavish subsidies for displaced workers, socialized medicine and other improvements to our quality of life.
And this is what I mean by the existential crisis underlying the alleged existential threat of climate change.
According to the Washington Post, in July, Saikat Chakrabarti, who then was Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, admitted that, "The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn't originally a climate thing at all." The Post reported that, in a meeting with Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA), Chakrabarti said: "Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing."
Climate change is not the hoax that some claim it is. But to the extent that it's a crisis, people like Sanders, Cortez and Warren want to use it as an excuse to radically transform the American economy and political system along lines that have less to do with climate change and much to do with their ideological animosity to the status quo.
And when the fight against climate change conflicts with their fight for "social justice," it's climate change that takes a backseat.
The existential threat is the excuse for fixing the existential crisis of the American left.
SOURCE
Automakers Demand More Electric Vehicle Tax Breaks
In Washington's upside-down parlance, a temporary subsidy actually means something closer to permanent. A recent example demonstrating this reality is the electric-vehicle (EV) tax credit. Back in 2009, part of Barack Obama's so-called "stimulus" package included an EV tax break intended to help the auto industry counter the high cost of developing electric cars. As The Wall Street Journal explains, "The federal government currently provides a $7,500 consumer tax break for an auto maker's first 200,000 cars. The tax credit then drops by half for EVs sold over the next six months, and by half again for another six months. It then disappears."
However, as Tesla and General Motors both surpassed 200,000 EV's sold last year, and Ford, Nissan, and Toyota are quickly closing in on that sales threshold, automakers are lobbying Congress for the tax break to be extended up to 400,000 sales. And thus far their lobbying has proven somewhat successful. Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) are currently floating an extension for the EV tax break. If passed it would cost taxpayers an estimated $16 billion over the next 10 years.
As the Journal notes, "It's hard to imagine a more blatant income transfer for the well-to-do. Electric cars are significantly more expensive than the average vehicle, with a starting price of around $36,000. A recent Congressional Research Service study found that nearly 80% of the credits were claimed by households with adjusted gross income of more than $100,000. Sales data show that about half of all electric vehicle sales occur in one state - California." We're shocked - shocked.
Washington's habit of picking winners and losers rather than letting the free market decide only ends up costing everyone. It's time to end these subsidies, not extend them.
SOURCE
WMO Secretary General Warns Against Climate `Doomsters and Extremists'
The Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that the alarmist narrative on climate change has gone off the rails and criticised the news media for provoking unjustified anxiety.
Speaking to Finland's financial newspaper Talousel„m„ ("The Journal") on 6 September 2019, Petteri Taalas called for cooler heads to prevail, saying that he does not accept arguments of climate alarmists that the end of the world is at hand.
Dr Taalas also spoke of the dangers of green extremism:
While climate sceptisism has become less of an issue, now we are being challenged from the other side. Climate experts have been attacked by these people and they claim that we should be much more radical. They are doomsters and extremists; they make threats."
And he called for the media both to challenge experts and allow a broader range of opinions to be heard.
The director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, Dr Benny Peiser, welcomed Dr Taalas's intervention:
It's very welcome to hear the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization finally challenging eco-zealots.
I hope mainstream climate scientists and the news media sit up and take notice; it's high time they put some professional distance between themselves and radical greens and start to question their apocalyptic narrative of doom."
SOURCE
Coral death knell on Great Barrier reef 'exaggerated'
The Greenie crooks photographed the few bad bits of coral and ignored large undamaged areas nearby. And note this is about a close-in reef, which the Greenies squeal loudest about
The death of inshore corals near Bowen had been greatly exaggerated, according to the findings of a rebel quality assurance survey by reef-science outsiders Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy.
The shallow reef flats of Stone Island have played a key role in divisions over the health of the inshore Great Barrier Reef and the impact of run-off from agriculture.
Dr Ridd was disciplined for attempting to blow the whistle on the widespread use of before and after pictures, taken a century apart, near Stone Island that suggested coral cover had disappeared.
A follow-up paper by Queensland University reef scientist Tara Clark, co-authored by Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chief scientist David Wachenfeld, confirmed the coral loss.
Despite winning his unfair dismissal case against JCU and being yesterday awarded more than $1.2m by the Federal Court, D. Ridd has effectively dismissed as a crank. by the other scientists.
An expert panel last month accused him of spreading scientific misinformation like tobacco lobbyists and anti-vaccination campaigners.
But Dr Ridd and Dr Marohasy have spent the past two weeks documenting the corals around Stone Island, which they found were still very much alive. The in-the-water quality assurance snapshot of onshore corals near Bowen and the Whitsundays has been partly funded by the Institute of Public Affairs.
The hundreds of hours of aerial and aquatic footage will be archived and some of this made into a documentary. Dr Marohasy and Dr Ridd repeated the transects used in the Clark research which found there had been a serious deline in reef health from historical photographs in the late 19th century to the present.
Dr Marohasy said if the transects used in the Clark analysis had been extended by 30m to the south of Stone Island they would have found a different story.. "I saw and photographed large pink plate coral on August 25 - some more than lm in diameter - at the reef edge, where Tara Clark and colleagues ended their transect as published in Nature," Dr Marohasy said. Several hundred metres away, across the headland, in the northern-facing bay, was an area of 100 per cent coral cover stretching over 25ha.
Dr Ridd said the finding of the survey was that there was "good coral all over the place" around Stone Island. "What we saw was not consistent with the proposition that the inshore reefs have been destroyed by farm run-off," Dr Ridd said.
He said the findings were at odds to those of Dr Clark and her team. The survey results follow a report by GBRMPA last week that downgraded the long-term outlook for the reef from poor-to very poor with particular concern about run-off in onshore reef areas.
Dr Ridd said there were "lots of people around Bowen who get very angry when people say all their coral is wiped out". "How would people in Sydney feel if everybody was saying that the water in Sydney Harbour has turned brown from pollution, the bridge was rusting scrap and the Opera House was crumbling ruin," he said.
Dr Wachenfeid said it was always great to see evidence of healthy coral in inshore areas. "The body of published science tells us most of our inshore reefs are extensively degraded," he said. 'When we find healthy patches that's good news."
Dr Wachenfeld said a paper published in 2016 contained infor-mation about coral around Stone Island and nearby Middle Reef.
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 September, 2019
Global Warming Made Dorian Stronger, Say Discredited Scientists
I deliberately did not at first comment on the predictable claim from Warmists to the effect that global warming had made the recent hurricane worse. I was sure a skeptic closer to the data would do the honours. And, sure enough, Paul Homewood has demolished the claim. I reproduce his post below -- JR
The Grauniaid article is not worth repeating, as it is full of the same lies we see every year, every time there is a bit of bad weather. Guardian readers naturally fall for it every time, without even thinking to question it
But if there was any truth to Mann and Dessler's little theories, would not we see clear proof in the actual data?
No of Major Atlantic Hurricanes - 1851 to 2018
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E11.html
According to the experts at NOAA's Hurricane Research Division, however, there were many more major Atlantic hurricanes in the 1940s and 50s, than in the last two decades.
Data from the pre 1940s is of course not comparable, as there were no satellites or hurricane hunter aircraft around to spot every storm in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
As for the dip in numbers in the 1970s and 80s, this is a well understood effect of the AMO, which went into cold phase in those years:
If the Mann/Dessler theories are correct, then sea temperatures must have been just as high back then as now
And if they weren't then so much for the potty theory!
We can, of course, totally discount the "wetter" storms argument. There is simply no data to prove it, mere supposition. Given the fact that their "stronger storms" argument is trashed by the actual data, I think we can safely ignore anything else they have to say
We are well aware of Michael Mann's unreliability as a "scientist". Not only did he try to produce the now utterly discredited hockey stick, but he has recently lost his court case against Tim Ball, because of his refusal to divulge the data behind it
What about Andy Dessler? He is professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, so you would assume he might know what he is talking about. As with most climate scientists though, you would be wrong
This was what he had to say in 2011:
As you sit by the pool and sweat this summer, one book you should be reading is The Impact of Global Warming on Texas (University of Texas Press, June 2011, second edition). This book, written by a group of Texas academics, is a sober analysis of our state's vulnerability to climate change - and the things we can do about it.
It is a particularly appropriate read as we suffer through the hellish summer of 2011. While it is unknown exactly how much human activities are contributing to this summer's unpleasant weather, one lesson from the book is clear: Get used to it. The weather of the 21st century will be very much like the hot and dry weather of 2011. Giving extra credibility to this forecast is the fact that the weather extremes that we are presently experiencing were predicted in the first edition in 1995.
https://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Texas-is-vulnerable-to-warming-climate-2079164.php
And the reality?
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/statewide/time-series/41/pcp/3/8/1895-2019?
Dessler's dry summer was a one-off, and since then Texas summers have in fact been much wetter than the 20thC average
It is also evident that there have been other periods on record, where summer droughts have been much prolonged than that single year of 2011.
Of course, in fifty years we might be looking back and agreeing how right Andy Dessler was.
But in what other discipline of science would the so called "experts" be allowed to get away with statements that flew in the face of the actual data?
SOURCE
The environmental fiasco of wind energy
Wind turbines only last for around 20 years, so many of them are now wearing out. That raises serious questions about disposal of defunct wind turbine parts. The turbines' giant blades are not recyclable, so they must be dumped in landfills. The Sioux Falls Argus Leader reports on one South Dakota landfill that is saying no mas to wind turbine blades:
[T]he Argus Leader reports that more than 100 wind turbine blades measuring 120 ft long have been dumped in a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, landfill, but there's a problem: the massive blades are taking up too much room, according to local City officials. .
A wind farm near Albert Lea, Minn., brought dozens of their old turbine blades to the Sioux Falls dump this summer.
But City Hall says it won't take anymore unless owners take more steps to make the massive fiberglass pieces less space consuming.
The wind energy industry isn't immune to cyclical replacement, with turbine blades needing to be replaced after a decade or two in use. That has wind energy producers looking for places to accept the blades on their turbines that need to be replaced.
For at least one wind-farm in south central Minnesota, it found the Sioux Falls Regional Sanitary Landfill to be a suitable facility to take its aged-out turbine blades.
Why is a Minnesota wind farm trucking its used-up blades to South Dakota for disposal? I don't know. The reason presumably is either regulatory or economic.
This year, 101 turbine blades have been trucked to the city dump. But with each one spanning 120 feet long, that's caused officials with the landfill and the Sioux Falls Public Works Department to study the long-term effect that type of refuse could have on the dump.
***
"We can't take any more unless they process them before bringing them to us," Cotter said. "We're using too many resources unloading them, driving over them a couple times and working them into the ground."
I doubt that many "green" energy advocates have thought seriously about the environmental problems associated with decommissioning wind farms. It isn't just disposing of the fiberglass blades, as this 15-second video relates:
If a wind farm includes 100 turbines, that means that 500 million pounds of concrete (which off-gases CO2, by the way) have been poured into what previously was likely farm land. When the turbines are defunct after a mere 20 years, what will be done with hundreds of millions of pounds of concrete? To my knowledge, wind farm developers are not required to have any plan to reclaim the land when the useful life of the turbines has expired-which, in many cases, is right around the corner. My guess is that there is no plan whatsoever to deal with this issue.
Wind energy, like solar energy, is an environmental disaster-just one more reason why it should not be subsidized or mandated by government.
SOURCE
NOT A JOKE: College Professor Says To Combat Climate Change By Eating Human Flesh
Climate Change alarmism has taken a macabre turn that will seem to be satire, but is not. It happened in Sweden.
At a summit for food of the future (the climate-ravaged future) called Gastro Summit, in Stockholm Sept 3-4, a professor held a powerpoint presentation asserting that we must "awaken the idea" of eating human flesh in the future, as a way of combatting the effects of climate change.
In a talk titled "Can you Imagine Eating Human Flesh?" behavioral scientist and marketing strategist Magnus S”derlund from "Handelsh”gskolan" (College of Commerce) argues for the breaking down of the ancient taboos against desecrating the human corpse and eating human flesh.
He refers to the taboos against it as "conservative," and discusses people's resistance to it as a problem that could be overcome, little by little, beginning with persuading people to just taste it. He can be seen in his video presentation and on State Swedish Television channel TV4 saying that since food sources will be scarce in the future, people must be introduced to eating things they have thus far considered disgusting-among them, human flesh.
Easier sells he suggests include: pets and insects. But human flesh was the central topic. In Swedish articles describing this new debate, the term "mannisko-k”tts branschen" is introduced. This means "the human flesh industry."
SOURCE
Petitioning Against Climate Alarmism Goes Global
A petition being submitted by hundreds of independent climate scientists and professionals from numerous countries to heads of the European Council, Commission and Parliament declares "There is No Climate Emergency."
Briefly summarized, the request for consideration conveys five urgent messages:
Climate change is real and has been occurring with nature-driven cold and warm cycles for as long as the planet has existed.
There should be no surprise that the Earth has been warming through natural causes since the last Little Ice Age ended around 1870. Actual temperature increases, however, are far less than predicted by theoretical climate models.
There is no real evidence that anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2 emissions are a major or dangerous warming influence. They instead offer great benefits to agriculture, forestry and photosynthesis that is the basis for life.
There is also no scientific evidence that increasing CO2 levels are causing more natural disasters. However, CO2-reduction measures do have devastating impacts on wildlife (e.g. wind turbines), land use (e.g. forest clearance), and vital energy systems.
Energy policies must be based on scientific and economic realities - not upon a harmful and unrealistic "2050-carbon-neutral policy" driven by unfounded climate alarm.
The petition concludes by recommending the recognition of clear difference in policies addressing the Earth's environment through good stewardship versus Earth's climate, the latter of which "is largely caused by a complex combination of natural phenomena we cannot control."
This recent petition to EU leaders signed by approximately 100 Italian scientists from many prominent organizations urges recognition of the same basic realities.
The Italian petition calls attention to the fact that the planet has previously been warmer than the present period, despite lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Warming periods have been repeated about every thousand years, including "the well-known Medieval Warm Period, the Hot Roman Period, and generally warm periods during the Optimal Holocene period."
Most recent climate warming observed since 1850 followed the Little Ice Age - the coldest period of the last 10,000 years. "Since then, solar activity, following its [previous cooling-influence] millennial cycle, has increased by heating the Earth's surface."
The notification advises that climate, "the most complex system on our planet," needs to be addressed with scientific methods that are "adequate and consistent with its level of complexity."
This system "is not sufficiently understood. And while CO2 is indisputably a greenhouse gas, "according to [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC itself, the climate sensitivity to its increase in the atmosphere is still extremely uncertain."
The petition states that "In any case, many recent studies based on experimental data estimate that the climate sensitivity to CO2 is considerably lower than estimated by the IPCC models." Accordingly, all evidence suggests that such models "overestimate the anthropic [human] contribution and underestimate the natural climatic variability, especially that induced by the sun, the moon, and ocean oscillations."
Likewise, alarmist media claims that extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and cyclones, are increasing in frequency are entirely inaccurate and typically far more directly tied to natural ocean oscillation cycles.
Again, the Italian signatories from numerous universities and research organizations take strong issue against "deplorable propaganda" claiming that carbon dioxide is a pollutant rather than a molecule that is indispensable to life on our planet.
Accordingly, given "the crucial importance that fossil fuels have for the energy supply of humanity," the petitioners urge that the EU should not adopt economically burdensome and unwarranted CO2 reduction policies under "the illusory pretense of governing the climate."
The petitioners also emphasize that while credible facts must be based upon scientific methods, not determined by numbers of supporting theorists, there is no alleged "consensus" among specialist in many and varied climate disciplines suggesting that human-influenced climate change presents an imminent danger. They point out that many thousands of scientists have previously expressed dissent with alarmist ant- fossil energy conjecture.
More than 31,000 American scientists from diverse climate-related disciplines signed a Global Warming Petition Project rejecting limits on greenhouse gas emissions attached to the 1977 Kyoto Protocol and similar proposals. The list of signatories included 9,021 Ph.D.s, 6,961 at the master's level, 2,240 medical doctors, and 12,850 carrying a bachelor of science or equivalent academic degree.
A 12-page petition attachment was introduced with a cover letter issued by Fredrick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences and former president of Rockefeller University. It read, in part:
"This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful."
The letter added, "The proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations around the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to over 4 billion people in technologically undeveloped countries."
Gratefully, an American Congress at that time listened to that sage advice and unanimously agreed. We can only fervently hope that more current legislators will continue to be equally wise.
SOURCE
Professor Ridd awarded $1.2m for unlawful sacking
The Federal Circuit Court has awarded Peter Ridd $1.2 million in damages and penalties after earlier finding James Cook University (JCU) acted unlawfully in sacking the physics professor.
Dr Ridd was sacked last year after he repeatedly questioned colleagues' research on the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef, criticising it as untrustworthy and "misleading".
The court, which in April found his dismissal was unlawful, on Friday said Dr Ridd would now be seen as "damaged goods" and the university had "poisoned the well".
Outlining his final declarations and penalties, Judge Salvatore Vasta also suggested the university's conduct bordered on "paranoia and hysteria fuelled by systemic vindictiveness" and Dr Ridd must have felt he was being persecuted. He found Dr Ridd's intellectual freedom had been undermined by the "myopic and unjustified actions of his lifelong employer".
"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.
The case has attracted intense focus due to Dr Ridd's scepticism about climate change science and the broader debate about free speech at Australian universities.
Judge Vasta said Dr Ridd had suffered a loss of income and agreed with the academic's view that "most big institutions don't want a bar of somebody who has been through my sort of controversy".
He said Dr Ridd would face difficulty securing employment "despite his considerable expertise", finding the problem had been exacerbated by a statement released by the university following the court's initial judgment.
Judge Vasta ordered a payment of $1.09 million in damages and compensation for lost wages and superannuation. This sum is provisional, with the university and Dr Ridd able to contest the calculation. Another $125,000 is to be paid to Dr Ridd as a penalty to "deter both this university and any other employer from dismissing an employee for exercising basic workplace rights".
Dr Ridd had originally sought reinstatement to his position but subsequently abandoned that request in favour of compensation.
On Friday, the university reiterated its intent to appeal Judge Vasta's decision. "The university has previously made clear its intention to appeal His Honour's decision in this matter. As a litigant it is entitled to do so. The university's position will be addressed in its appeal," a spokesman said.
The institution has maintained Dr Ridd was not sacked for expressing scientific views but rather his treatment of colleagues and breaches of confidentiality.
Conservative think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs welcomed Judge Vasta's findings, calling the university's conduct "shameful" and proof of a free speech crisis in academia.
"The sum awarded reflects the appalling nature of JCU's treatment of Dr Ridd and vindicates Peter Ridd's fight for academic freedom, free speech and integrity of climate science and peer review," IPA director of policy Gideon Rozner said.
"James Cook University must now rethink its stated plans to prolong this ugly dispute by appealing the decision. Dr Ridd won this case on all 17 counts. It is time for JCU to accept the decision and move on."
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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6 September, 2019
Charming Chalmers
Despite its quite Anglo name, Chalmers University of Technology is in Sweden. It has a Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism -- the point of which appears to be an attempt to show that climate skeptics are nuts in some way. I reproduce their blurb below. They have really drunk the Kool-Aid. And you've guessed it: Climate skeptics are RACISTS.
I am greatly looking forward to seeing their research reports. Survey research into personality characteristics is my long suit (See my list of published academic papers here) and I have every confidence that I will be able to drive a Mack truck through whatever they produce. Leftist psychologists have been trying to prove that conservatives are nuts since 1950 so I know how sloppy their research is and how easy it is to debunk.
They do list some recent publications that they think support their beliefs but they are a hoot. Get a load of the Abstract below. They don't even seem to know what an abtract does. It is just a blurb with virtually no details of the research they are supposedly abstracting. There are no details of the sampling, no reference for the measuring instrument and no details of its reliability and validity, and no tests of statistical significance.
It must be the most incompetent abstract I have ever seen. An abstract should be full of hard data. This one is full of waffle. On that precedent what we can expect to come out from the Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism will be fairly brain-damaged.
Cool dudes in Norway: climate change denial among conservative Norwegian men
Olve Krange et al.
ABSTRACT
In their article `Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States' the authors state: `Clearly the extent to which the conservative white male effect on climate change denial exists outside the US is a topic deserving investigation.' Following this recommendation, we report results from a study in Norway. McCright and Dunlap argue that climate change denial can be understood as an expression of protecting group identity and justifying a societal system that provides desired benefits. Our findings resemble those in the US study. A total of 63 per cent of conservative males in Norway do not believe in anthropogenic climate change, as opposed to 36 per cent among the rest of the population who deny climate change and global warming. Expanding on the US study, we investigate whether conservative males more often hold what we term xenosceptic views, and if that adds to the `cool dude-effect'.1 Multivariate logistic regression models reveal strong effects from a variable measuring `xenosceptic cool dudes'. Interpreting xenoscepticism as a rough proxy for right leaning views, climate change denial in Norway seems to merge with broader patterns of right-wing nationalism.
SOURCE ?
The blurb:
With Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, as a hub, the world's first global research network looking into climate change denial has now been established.
Scientific and political awareness of the greenhouse effect and human influence on the climate has existed for over three decades. During the 1980s, there was a strong environmental movement and a political consensus on the issue, but in recent years, climate change denial - denying that changes to the climate are due to human influence on the environment - has increased which makes the case for understanding why this is so.
The comprehensive project: "Why don't we take climate change seriously? A study of climate change denial", is now collecting the world's foremost researchers in this area. In the project, the network will examine the ideas and interests behind climate change denial, with a particular focus on right-wing nationalism, extractive industries, and conservative think tanks. The goal is to increase understanding of climate change denial, and its influence on political decision-making, but also to raise awareness among the general public, those in power, research institutes, and industry.
Right-wing nationalism's links to climate change denial are a relatively unresearched topic, but Environmental Sociology recently published an article where Hultman and his research colleagues show the connections between conservatism, xenophobia, and climate change denial, through a study in Norway.
Through the new research project, a unique international collaborative platform for research into climate change denial, Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism (CEFORCED), will be established, which will connect around 40 of the world's foremost scientific experts in the area and pave the way for international comparisons. The platform builds upon the world's first conference in the subject, which Hultman and Professor Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State University organized in 2016.
An important foundation of the project will be a broad, interdisciplinary view of climate change denial, linking together different disciplines such as geopolitics, environmental psychology, technological history, environmental sociology, gender research, environmental history, energy policy, environmental humanism and technology and science studies.
"We do not dismiss climate change denial as something limited to, for example, powerful, older men with strong connections to the fossil-fuels industry - even if such organized groups do play important roles. Knowledge of climate change and its causes has been around for a long time, so firstly, we also need to understand the type of reactions and everyday denials that explain why we don't take the greenhouse effect seriously - even when we see the consequences in front of our eyes."
SOURCE
Natural Gas, America's Wonder Fuel
One of the many idiocies of the "Green New Deal" and other such anti-fossil fuel crusades is that all of this arrives on the political scene at a time when the price of producing energy from fossil fuels is lower than at any time before in human history.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that natural gas prices "in Europe and Asia have plummeted this year to historic lows." Meanwhile in the United States, the natural gas price is flirting with a price of $2 per million BTUs. This means natural gas prices have fallen by 80% since 2005 and the advent of the shale gas revolution.
What is wonderful about this story is that U.S. production from places like Ohio and Pennsylvania and the Marcellus Shale is what is driving down worldwide prices. America is now the OPEC of natural gas production as our exports surge.
The production bonanza due to technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling continues to make America rich while it has shifted the geopolitics of the global energy story away from the Middle East and Russia. And America's energy supplies are effectively a bottomless pool - with hundreds of years of reserves with existing drilling capabilities. No, we are not running out of fossil fuels.
The U.S. and worldwide shift to natural gas is reducing carbon emissions that are said to contribute to global warming. America's emissions have fallen more than any industrial nation's in the last two years. The per household annual savings are in the hundreds of dollars per year. Cheap gas is like a tax cut. What should policymakers conclude about this multitrillion-dollar gift of energy wealth that God has endowed America with?
First, the "keep it in the ground" mentality of the left - just last week supported by the editorial page of media outlets like USA Today - is looney-tunes. These assets could continue to increase America's GDP by hundreds of billions of dollars a year for at least the next half-century. The war-on-fossil-fuels mentality would deprive American firms, workers and the government of trillions of dollars in income and wages.
Some of this increase in wealth could and likely would be devoted to combating climate change without submerging our economy. History demonstrates over and over that making a country richer increases its level of environmental protection.
The other policy lesson of the new era of cheap, abundant, clean and made-in-America natural gas is that we do not need another penny of taxpayer subsidies for any alternative energy sources. Natural gas is the energy source that delivers without a penny of taxpayer cost. It will force other energy sources from nuclear to coal to wind to solar to compete or whither and die.
Why does Washington continue to spend tens of billions in tax dollars looking for inferior alternatives?
We've been promised for 30 years that wind and solar energy will be the power sources of the future, and yet when the massive tax subsidies are threatened to be taken away, the industry flacks pout that this will be the death of the industry. These are the infant energy sources that never leave the federal nest.
Zero subsidies should be the rallying cry of sound 21st-century American energy policy. If the Europeans and Chinese want to spend money on expensive and inefficient energy sources, they should be our guests. If America uses energy from natural gas that is one-half to one-third as expensive as green energy, it's one of the best ways to make American manufacturing, technology, steel and agriculture the cheapest and most productive in the world. It's also a smart way to keep making America great again.
SOURCE
To lower residential energy costs, waive goodbye to the Jones Act
The Jones Act is a 1920s legislative relic, a wasteful one-hundred-year old attempt by Congress to address a post-World War I surplus of merchant ships. Today, it is known mostly for its mandate that all goods, shipped by boat between any US port and the ports of some US territories, be carried on US-flagged vessels. Currently, the cost of shipping goods on US-flagged ships is almost three times as expensive as shipping them on foreign vessels. However, because of sustained lobbying by US mercantile marine interests, the mandate continues today.
For at least one commodity, domestically produced natural gas the situation is especially dire. The Jones Act mandate makes it impossible to ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) from one US port to another, as no vessels in the current US fleet are capable of carrying the gas between the Gulf and New York or Boston.
The result is that power companies and others in the Northeastern United States have to purchase LNG from foreign suppliers at substantially higher prices than would otherwise be the case. Thus, natural gas prices in New England are substantially higher than in other US regions.
Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee in Congress, recently offered an amendment to the Coast Guard Authorization Bill that would waive the Jones Act mandate and permit foreign ships to move goods, including LNG, between US ports if no US ship were available within 60 days. The amendment was rejected amid claims that the LNG issue could be resolved by building a pipeline, and that other waiver programs were already in place.
Those claims represent more of a pipe-dream than a pipeline reality. New pipeline projects are expensive. Since 1996, according to information from the Energy Information Administration, it would cost around $19.5 million per mile to build a pipeline through New England. So building roughly 500 miles of pipeline to move natural gas to Boston from the closest source of supply in Pennsylvania would mean $9.75 billion in construction costs.
Construction costs are not the only problem. New natural gas pipeline projects need years to obtain the required regulatory authorizations. The process includes permits, land purchases, rights of way, environmental impact assessments, and compliance with local, state, and federal regulations. A pipeline proposal initiated today would therefore likely take at least a decade to complete. Realistically, given the current complexities of local and state jurisdictional and political issues, any new pipeline project in New England could be politically infeasible.
The Jones Act waiver proposed by Senator Lee makes obvious economic sense from the perspective of New England consumers, power companies, and a wide swath of commercial interests. Moreover, in the case of LNG and other natural gas shipments, there would be no obvious damage to US shipping companies as none of them operate Jones Act eligible ships capable of delivering LNG in commercial quantities to America's Northeast.
Providing a Jones Act waiver process would allow US energy companies to exploit their global advantage in natural gas production and expand the extent to which they supply important domestic markets in New England. Since the mid-2000s, on average, natural gas prices in the United States have steadily decreased as domestic production has expanded (it has increased by over 50 percent since 2005), in part due to fracking technologies. Since 2005, US exports of natural gas to other countries have increased almost five fold. Despite this opportunity for cheaper energy, the Jones Act mandate denies New England consumers similar access to inexpensive domestic LNG.
Interestingly Massachusetts receives the majority of its natural gas by pipeline from US sources, but that is not enough for the state's needs, so the rest currently comes, by ship, at much higher prices from foreign sources. New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine get most of their gas from interstate transfers in the US. Vermont's natural gas comes almost entirely from Canada.
Finally, some have claimed that Senator Lee's amendment is not needed because two waiver programs already exist. The first waiver allows the President to suspend the Jones Act for national security reasons, not for commercial purposes, and is therefore irrelevant here. The second, which permits foreign-flagged vessels built before 1996 to carry LNG or liquid petroleum from US ports to Puerto Rico, is also functionally irrelevant as almost all LNG vessels are replaced well before they are 23 years old for safety, efficiency, and cost-saving reasons.
Waiving the Jones Act would have a substantial beneficial impact on the sales of natural gas by US producers to US consumers in New England. Both parties would benefit. Senator Lee's common sense amendment to the recent Coast Guard Authorization Bill would mitigate any need to construct unnecessary expensive additional pipelines. Waiving the Jones Act is a good bipartisan idea whose time has more than come.
SOURCE
UK: Underwater meadow will catch carbon
An undersea meadow is to be sown off the Pembrokeshire coast to restore a habitat that captures carbon from the atmosphere quicker than a rainforest.
Underwater meadows of seagrass, a flowering plant found in sheltered, shallow coastal spots, were once common in British waters.
The grass can capture carbon from the atmosphere up to 35 times faster than rainforest vegetation. It also serves as a nursery for marine life, including endangered seahorses. A patch of 10,000 square metres can support 80,000 fish and 100 million invertebrates.
However, 90 per cent of Britain's seagrass is estimated to have been lost over the past century - destroyed by sewage and agricultural pollution, torn up by ships' propellors and chain moorings or choked by coastal development.
SOURCE
Australia's ABC ridicules sound science about the Great Barrier Reef
Media Watch is everything that is wrong with the ABC, squeezed into 15 insufferable minutes. Smug, elitist and, above all, awash with the misguided idea that commercial media outlets are not to be trusted and that the only place where honest news can be found is in Aunty's warm, state-sponsored embrace.
The program is usually best ignored, but its segment this week on the saga of Peter Ridd is worth calling out for its breathless hypocrisy.
For the uninitiated, Ridd is a marine geophysicist who, until recently, was professor of physics at James Cook University in Townsville. Ridd is also an expert on the Great Barrier Reef and disputes the view that it is being killed by climate change.
Earlier this year the Federal Circuit Court found that his dismissal was unlawful.
Fast forward to this week's Media Watch in which host Paul Barry spent a fair chunk of taxpayer-funded time bemoaning the attention from The Australian and other outlets to Ridd's perspective on reef science.
The coverage, according to Barry, was "a real free kick" and "a free platform, with no opposing viewpoints".
That the ABC could complain about a lack of opposing viewpoints is staggering.
When it comes to climate change in particular, the ABC is hopelessly predisposed towards climate alarmism. That may explain why up until Monday night, the ABC has shown less interest in the Ridd affair.
Ridd's sacking, legal appeal and eventual victory in court attracted such strong public interest that eventually even the federal Attorney-General weighed in when the subject was raised by numerous colleagues in a recent partyroom meeting. But coverage from our "trusted" public broadcaster?
Not much. A search of the ABC's website returns just a handful of reports on what was the most significant case on academic freedom in many years.
If the ABC had bothered, they would know that Ridd's beef isn't just with popular notions of doom and gloom surrounding the Great Barrier Reef but also with the quality of the underlying science.
Much of it, according to Ridd, is not being properly checked, tested or replicated.
As a result, governments are spending billions of dollars and jeopardising whole industries to "save" the reef when it probably doesn't need saving.
It should be noted as well that throughout the extensive disciplinary process against Ridd, James Cook University never once addressed his complaints about the poor quality of climate science coming out of the univer-sity, a fact highlighted by the judge himself during Ridd's case.
But far be it for the ABC to let poor science get in the way of a good story. Naturally, the segment included an article from The Guardian citing a handful of scientists who are adamant the Great Barrier Reef is in trouble and that Ridd should be ignored.
Media Watch even repeated hysterical comparisons between Ridd's research and anti-vaxxer campaigns.
Interestingly, one scientist cited by the ABC was Terry -Hughes. Like Ridd, Hughes is based at James Cook, and arguably triggered the whole saga when, according to court documents, he lodged a complaint about some relatively mild comments Ridd made in relation to reef science on Sky News. This connection was apparently missed by the Media Watch team.
What the ABC doesn't understand is that the Ridd saga is about much more than the Great Barrier Reef or even climate science.
It raises serious questions about academic freedom, about the right of a university professor to voice dissenting views without being hounded out of his tenure, as Ridd was by James Cook.
This is why Ridd was supported by a large section of the community. Many of his university colleagues defended him and one resigned in disgust.
He even received support from the National Tertiary Education Union - not exactly a bastion of right-wing views. But of course, on the ABC, all of that complexity is lost, reduced to a tired pantomime about right-wing commentators pushing the views of one scientist to advance their own murky climate agenda.
Now, if the ABC were a private organisation it could take whatever editorial line it wanted - and would be far from the only outlet in Australia to sympathise with climate evangelism. But the ABC receives $1.1 billion of our money each year for news coverage that, by law, must be balanced.
Maybe the ABC should comply with its charter and make way for alternative views rather than taking juvenile pot shots at its rivals.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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5 September, 2019
Australian Medical Association declares climate change a health emergency
Warmists have been pushing this claim for years but it was always nonsense. The bottom line is that winter is the great time of dying, not summer. On balance, warming is good for you
AMA president Tony Bartone says climate change will affect health by increasing the spread of infectious diseases and through more extreme weather. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
The Australian Medical Association has formally declared climate change a health emergency, pointing to "clear scientific evidence indicating severe impacts for our patients and communities now and into the future".
The AMA's landmark shift, delivered by a motion of the body's federal council, brings the organisation into line with forward-leaning positions taken by the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association and Doctors for the Environment Australia.
The American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians recognised climate change as a health emergency in June 2019, and the British Medical Association the following month declared a climate emergency and committed to campaign for carbon neutrality by 2030.
The World Health Organisation has recognised since 2015 that climate change is the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century, and argued the scientific evidence for that assessment is "overwhelming".
The AMA has recognised the health risks of climate change since 2004. Having now formally recognised that climate change is a health emergency, the peak organisation representing doctors in Australia is calling on the Morrison government to promote an active transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy; adopt mitigation targets within an Australian carbon budget; promote the health benefits of addressing climate change; and develop a national strategy for health and climate change.
The AMA president, Tony Bartone, argues the scientific evidence is clear. "There is no doubt that climate change is a health emergency. The AMA accepts the scientific evidence on climate change and its impact on human health and human wellbeing," he says.
Bartone says the climate science suggests warming will affect human health and wellbeing "by increasing the environment and situations in which infectious diseases can be transmitted, and through more extreme weather events, particularly heatwaves".
"Climate change will cause higher mortality and morbidity from heat stress," the AMA president says. "Climate change will cause injury and mortality from increasingly severe weather events. Climate change will cause increases in the transmission of vector-borne diseases. Climate change will cause food insecurity resulting from declines in agricultural outputs. Climate change will cause a higher incidence of mental ill-health.
"These effects are already being observed internationally and in Australia."
Bartone told Guardian Australia the motion adopted by the federal council had followed an ongoing discussion among stakeholders, and medical practitioners within the AMA membership.
Health and medical groups, including Doctors for the Environment, the Climate and Health Alliance, the Royal Australian College of Physicians, and the Australian Medical Students' Association wrote an open letter to all political parties in April pointing out the "significant and profound impacts climate change has on the health of people and our health system".
The AMA president said the decision to pass the motion followed on from those events both domestically and internationally, and was "pretty much unanimous" internally. "I don't recall anyone speaking against it," he said.
Asked whether the current government was pursuing ambitious enough policy action to combat the risks of climate change, whichthe Morrison government argues it is, Bartone said "it's really difficult to say because this issue is clouded in conjecture and conflicting reports".
He said all of the political groups in the Australian parliament had a responsibility to move past the toxic partisan politics that had characterised the debate and find durable solutions to a difficult public policy challenge.
Bartone said the AMA would continue to assess the evidence about climate change as it emerged and update its stance to reflect the science.
The latest official data released last week confirms that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise in Australia. National emissions increased by 3.1m tonnes in the year to March to reach 538.9m tonnes, a 0.6% jump on the previous year.
Emissions in Australia have increased every year since the Abbott government repealed a national carbon price after taking office in 2013.
SOURCE
Automakers' Flip-Flop on CAFE Standards Kicks Car Buyers to the Curb
After advocating for the Trump administration to relax former President Barack Obama's stringent fuel economy mandates, several major automakers have rebuked the administration's proposed rule for freezing the mandate at model year 2020.
Now, the automakers are siding with California, voluntarily agreeing to increase the average fuel economy of their fleets to about 50 miles per gallon by 2026.
But what's been lost in the administration's tussle with California and the automakers is what's best for the consumer.
Each time the federal government imposes more stringent fuel-efficiency mandates, Washington overrides the preferences of car buyers.
The market for vehicles is not one-size-fits-all. Some consumers value speed, size, or safety over fuel efficiency.
In order to comply with fuel economy standards, car companies must forgo designing a vehicle based solely on what consumers actually want. The regulations force automakers to produce lighter, less safe vehicles. As the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety clearly states, "Bigger, heavier vehicles are safer."
To be clear, drivers value fuel efficiency. One of the biggest expenses for American families is transportation. Fully 95% of American adults own a vehicle and spend thousands of dollars annually on car payments, maintenance, and insurance. Gasoline is another significant cost.
Importantly, it's not a legitimate function of the federal government to tell consumers how to save money or what attributes should be most important when buying a product.
The federal government could ostensibly save consumers money by forcing all automakers to adhere to one design, but that would not make them better off.
Forcing automakers to meet fuel economy standards increases the upfront cost of new cars and trucks, as it requires new engineering designs, spending on new materials, and changes to vehicles that automakers might otherwise not make, just to comply.
The change in the price of new vehicles has ripple effects throughout the new and used car markets. Higher costs price new buyers out of the market and increase the demand for used vehicles, causing the price of used vehicles to rise.
Higher prices in the new and used vehicle markets cause car owners to hold onto their vehicles longer, resulting in less fleet turnover, which negates some of the intended fuel savings and emissions reductions.
Even when factoring in monetary savings from greater fuel economy, economists have shown that there's a net cost to consumers.
Furthermore, the estimated fuel savings are difficult to project. When promulgating corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) rules, the federal government projects gas prices several decades into the future.
While those price scenarios are plausible, increases in oil supply and changes in consumer behavior could drive prices down, and consumers would save much less money than projected.
When gas prices are low, there's less value to higher fuel economy. Either way, the reality is that it's very difficult to project gas prices 30 weeks into the future, let alone 30 years.
As Car and Driver notes, the Obama administration's targets, "first drafted in 2008, assumed a continuation of record-high gas prices, a heavy adoption of electric vehicles, and could not predict a U.S. oil boom that dramatically increased domestic production."
The bottom line is that markets are unpredictable.
No matter how well-intentioned or allegedly flexible a regulation may be, regulations do not appropriately adapt to the pace of innovation or changes in prices and consumption trends.
The federal government implemented fuel economy mandates under the false premise of imminent resource exhaustion. They are a relic of the past. Those mandates were not good policy in the 1970s, and they make even less sense today in an era of oil abundance.
Furthermore, proponents of fuel economy mandates incorrectly label spending to comply with the standards as an "investment."
They argue the mandates drive innovation and create jobs. However, the reality is automakers are paying to comply with an unnecessary regulation, and they pass the costs onto car and truck buyers.
Moreover, regulations are not economic drivers or job creators. Spending money to comply with mandates results in an opportunity cost. Money allocated toward regulatory compliance cannot be simultaneously invested elsewhere in the company, whether it be on creating innovations for consumers or hiring more employees.
Both the regulatory costs and the opportunity costs harm the consumer.
Whether it's clothing, food, or vehicles, markets work more efficiently when products are consumer-centric. The administration's rule moves the needle in the right direction by focusing on the consumers, not the automakers.
SOURCE
Banned by Big Oil - Jo Nova's Christmas speech for geologists cancelled by Woodside
So much for being "funded by fossil fuels" - they not only don't fund me, Big Oil won't even let me speak
It's all sweetness and light on the Woodside's "part-of-the-solution" home page. But a ton of industrial bricks are coming for those who dissent.
In March I was invited to present the FESAus Christmas function in December this year. They're the Formation Evaluation Society of Australia, a non-for-profit volunteer organisation for Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts. A niche technical club of experts. It was unpaid, but I was happy to help make it a fun and push some buttons. "Hot" graphs, cartoons and all.
But in June, suddenly it became controversial to make jokes about climate change. Committee members started resigning, and dummy-spit declarations were made that "a discussion about climate was stupid". People were shaken. The chips were on the table, the members said "yes" but the committee was split. When decision time came, the key committee meeting was hijacked by an outsider from Woodside who turned up by surprise and darkly threatened that all funding or support for the professional organisation and all future speakers from Woodside would be withdrawn if that climate denier, Jo Nova, was allowed to speak.
It was Woodside or me.
So my presentation was cancelled, and by Woodside no less. What's astonishing is the effort someone inside this 4 billion dollar revenue giant went to - to stop an unpaid blogger from speaking to a low profile, small technical organisation, with little, as in, almost zero, media influence. Seriously? As if a group of experienced geos were at risk of being badly influenced by yours truly - there are people who analyze seismic logs and signatures of key stratigraphic surfaces for fun. Does Woodside think they need "protection"? Or is Woodside just running chicken itself? Scared of the Western Australian EPA, which is currently calling for submissions, and promising draconian guidelines that threaten to kill off the industry? Woodside need the EPA to approve all their new projects. Petrophysicists might be almost all skeptical, but some either work for Woodside or hope too. Woodside are the largest operator of oil and gas production in Australia.
When asked to put their objections in writing the Woodside representative refused. When put the test, they weakly said they objected to all climate change discussions. But of course, there were, and are, other discussions mentioning climate on the agenda and they're not being threatened.
And the fallout hasn't finished yet - more resignations may take place if threats from Woodside prevent an esteemed member of FesAus from speaking in my place and about climate change. I hear he is skeptical too. That decision is due soon.
SOURCE
Boofhead Booker Releases $3 Trillion Climate Fantasy
Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker on Tuesday released a $3 trillion dollar plan to combat climate change after several of his opponents released their versions in recent weeks.
The New Jersey senator's plan aims to make the U.S. a 100 percent carbon-neutral economy by 2045 and combines two of his priorities, addressing economic inequality at the same time.
"As we address the existential threat of climate change, we must also confront deep and persistent economic inequality: the economy isn't working for millions of Americans, with income and wealth more concentrated among the ultra-wealthy than at any time since before the Great Depression," the plan reads.
Booker would earmark $400 billion for research grants for clean energy technologies and solutions, including "commercialization of clean energy technologies."
He also plans to dedicate $100 billion by 2030 to programs already in effect through the Department of Agriculture that make farms more climate resilient.
Like fellow contenders for the Democratic nomination Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Booker would also reverse the Trump administration's permits to continue work on the Keystone Pipeline and Dakota Access Pipeline as well as rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, which the Trump administration pulled out of in 2017.
Booker's plan is $1 trillion more than Warren's plan but much less expensive than Sanders's plan which would sink over $16.3 trillion into fighting the climate crisis.
SOURCE
Australia: Melbourne council bans residents from putting glass in recycling bin
This is recycling that has lost the plot. Glass is one thing that can easily be recycled. So glass recycling should be made easy, not hard
A Melbourne council has banned residents from putting glass in their recycling bins, forcing them to either travel to recycle the items or to let them go into landfill.
Macedon Ranges Shire Council has warned residents that if they place glass in their yellow bin then its whole contents will have to be thrown in landfill.
The council was forced to implement the sudden ban after the company behind Victoria's largest recycling processor went bust.
Recycling giant SKM collapsed owing more than $100 million to creditors, and after a series of factory fires and government shutdowns because of stockpiling safety risks.
The shutdown affected more than 32 councils across the state, with Macedon Ranges Shire Council being one of them.
"Council has identified a recycling company which will process the shire's recycling going forward as long as glass is removed and the other recyclables are not contaminated," the Council said.
"Shards and small pieces of glass can become embedded in paper and cardboard in recycling bins and contaminate the other recyclables."
In the coming weeks the council plans to install public skip bins around the area which residents can use to dispose of their glass.
But until then people that want to recycle their glass items will be forced to travel to one of three transfer stations in Kyneton, Woodend or Romsey.
For those residents that can't make the trip or simply refuse, the council had one final suggestion. "As a last resort, glass can be placed in general rubbish bins," the Council said.
The plan to remove glass from the mixed recycling bins was endorsed at an Ordinary Council Meeting last Wednesday.
A decision was also made to investigate whether to introduce a fourth bin that would be used for glass only.
Some people living in Lancefield are exempt from travelling to dispose of their glass as they have been provided with a special glass only bin as part of the trial.
Along with installing the public bins and introducing the glass bin trial, the Council also announced is allocated funds over temporary higher landfill costs and cover additional required staff and resources.
The Council will meet again in October to consider long-term options for recycling, like rolling out the fourth glass only bin across the shire.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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4 September, 2019
Is fake meat good for both you and for the environment?
It is too early to draw firm conclusions but there are significant problems with it
A new generation of plant-based meat alternatives (PBMAs) has entered the market. These products are specifically designed to mimic the taste and experience of eating meat, while being marketed as a way to accelerate the shift away from animal-based products. But should PBMAs be considered part of a healthy low-carbon diet (one that aims to reduce greenhouse gases due to the methods of production, packaging, processing, transport, preparation, and waste of food) that can help reduce reliance on industrial meat production? The answer to that question remains far from clear given the lack of rigorously designed, independently funded studies.
At this point, 2 companies dominate the PBMA landscape. Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat both offer burger patties, which are now available in numerous fast food restaurant chains, supermarkets, and other food entities primarily in North America. Designed to imitate the taste and experience of eating meat, these novel products are aimed to appeal to a broader consumer base than the relatively smaller vegan or vegetarian demographic that had more often been the target of earlier animal product alternatives.
For their touted climate and natural resource benefits and their unique mimicry of meat, PBMAs have garnered significant consumer attention. A recent Life Cycle Assessment commissioned by Beyond Meat found that the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions and requires 46% less energy, 99% less water, and 93% less land use compared with a burger made from US beef,4 leading to the conclusion that PBMAs are likely to have less environmental effects than industrial beef production based on the metrics analyzed. However, the robustness of this conclusion warrants further studies.
While environmental factors can and should be strong motivators of food choice, it is equally important to consider the effects of PBMAs on human health. It is important to be cautious in directly extrapolating the potential benefits found in previous research on plant-based foods and dietary patterns to PBMAs, given their highly processed nature. Randomized clinical trials have demonstrated that replacing red meat with nuts, legumes, and other plant-based protein foods reduces levels of total and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol.5 Long-term epidemiologic studies have also shown that this shift from red meat to plant foods is associated with lower risks of chronic diseases and total mortality.6 However, PBMAs incorporate purified plant protein rather than whole foods, with Beyond Burgers using pea protein isolate and Impossible Burgers using soy protein isolate and concentrate. A recent short-term controlled feeding study found that consuming diets high in ultra-processed food causes excess caloric intake and weight gain.7 Beyond the creation of calorically dense and highly palatable products, food processing can also lead to the loss of some nutrients and phytochemicals naturally present in plant foods.
While Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods burger patties are lower in total and saturated fat than a beef burger patty and contain zero cholesterol (they are similar in calories and protein), they are also both higher in sodium. Without further studies, there is no evidence to substantiate that these nutrient differences alone offer a significant health benefit. In fact, PBMAs are higher in saturated fat compared with most minimally processed plant-based protein sources, such as beans and lentils.
When assessing the health effects of PBMAs it is also necessary to consider how these products are consumed. For example, these popular PBMA burgers are often consumed in fast food settings where they may be placed on a refined grain bun with an array of toppings, served with french fries and even a sugary beverage. Thus, it is not possible to assume that substituting a PBMA patty for a beef patty improves overall diet quality.
In addition, another concern that is unique to the Impossible Burger must be considered. This product contains high amounts of heme (an iron-containing molecule) from soy plants added to the burger patty to enhance the product's meaty flavor and appearance. Higher intake of heme iron has been associated with increased body iron stores and elevated risk of developing type 2 diabetes.8
SOURCE
Pope Francis Calls for `Drastic Measures' to Combat `Climate Emergency'
He is tying the church to a Satanic lie
Human beings have caused "a climate emergency that gravely threatens nature and life itself," Pope Francis said Sunday before urging "drastic measures" to fight global warming.
In his Message for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, the pope adopted the apocalyptic language encouraged by climate alarmists to frighten people into taking action.
"Too many of us act like tyrants with regard to creation," he declared. "Let us make an effort to change and to adopt more simple and respectful lifestyles!"
"Now is the time to abandon our dependence on fossil fuels and move, quickly and decisively, towards forms of clean energy and a sustainable and circular economy. Let us also learn to listen to indigenous peoples, whose age-old wisdom can teach us how to live in a better relationship with the environment," he said.
The pope has apparently joined the climate alarmists in employing more incendiary language, dropping his former references to climate change to speak of a "climate emergency" and an "environmental crisis" in Sunday's message.
He also underscored the forthcoming United Nations Climate Action Summit as of "particular importance" while proposing that governments will have the responsibility there of showing the political will to take "drastic measures to achieve as quickly as possible zero net greenhouse gas emissions."
Referring specifically to fires in the Amazon region, Francis called on everyone to "take up these opportunities to respond to the cry of the poor and of our earth!"
"Egoism and self-interest have turned creation, a place of encounter and sharing, into an arena of competition and conflict," he said. "In this way, the environment itself is endangered: something good in God's eyes has become something to be exploited in human hands."
"Deterioration has increased in recent decades: constant pollution, the continued use of fossil fuels, intensive agricultural exploitation and deforestation are causing global temperatures to rise above safe levels," he said.
The pontiff went on to enumerate the effects of climate change: an "increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather phenomena," the "desertification of the soil," "melting of glaciers, scarcity of water, neglect of water basins and the considerable presence of plastic and microplastics in the oceans."
All of these "testify to the urgent need for interventions that can no longer be postponed," he warned.
SOURCE
CNN falsely pushes claims that `climate crisis is making hurricanes more dangerous'
CNN's fall from a purveyor of news to pure propaganda organ of the Left was vividly displayed yesterday. An anchor named Ana Cabrera accused an expert of "sidestepping" the purported issue of global warming making hurricanes more dangerous. She didn't interview the guest herself, but rather commented on a previous interview done by her colleague in which the other CNN anchor tried to bait guest Peter Gaynor, acting FEMA director, into blaming global warming:
"Researchers say that we're going to see even more very intense hurricanes due to the climate crisis. Do you agree with that?"
Gaynor refused to agree. When the recording of the interview was done, Cabrera blatantly stated (with prepared-in-advance slides with the text):
"Here are the facts we know that the climate crisis is making hurricanes more dangerous. Here are the top ways listed in order of scientific confidence. The sea level rise is making storm surge more dangerous and making storms wetter, increasing the rainfall rate, as well as the amount of precipitation a storm can produce. Strong storms are getting even stronger because of warmer oceans. And storms are rapidly intensifying more frequently. So we are seeing this play out in real time with hurricane Dorian, the strongest hurricane to ever hit the Bahamas on record."
What makes this so shameful is that there is no evidence at all that global warming has anything to do with Hurricane Dorian or any purported increase in hurricane activity. The National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration (NOAA) has officially debunked such claims. Today, Dr. Brian Joondeph presents charts he's made from historical records of hurricanes showing absolutely no trend in per-decade hurricane activity:
It is obvious from the fact that both anchors went out of their way to make a fatuous point that Jeff Zucker or his minions have imposed a party line on the on-air personalities. They want to punish Acting Director Gaynor and anyone else who fails to deliver their talking points, by slurring him not once but twice on air for the same interview.
But in the end, it is CNN that is being punished by viewers, who have reduced its audience share dramatically. AT&T, which owns CNN, is now robbing its shareholders of revenue that would be theirs if CNN hadn't shirked its role of news presenter in favor of blaring phony propaganda.
SOURCE
Media drown the truth with alarmist flooding claims
The climate media complex is making new claims about global warming causing increases in flooding, but objective evidence clearly contradicts the claims. Perhaps the media should check actual scientific evidence before making false global warming claims. Or maybe they do, but simply prefer not to report the truth.
The UK Guardian published an August 30 article, "What 500,000 Americans hit by floods can teach us about fighting climate change." Claiming that global warming is making floods worse, and telling personal interest stories about people who have dealt with floods, the article's sole scientific authority cited to support its claim is data showing more people have filed flood insurance claims in recent years, especially in comparison to the Reagan administration years.
The problem with such an assertion is that there are many more people living in the United States now than during the Reagan administration. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, there were 227 million people living in the United States. Currently, there are 329 million people living in the United States. More people living in America means more people will likely file claims of every sort - including flooding claims - regardless of whether there is any global warming or any increase in floods.
Also, urbanization and changes in policies to remove dams and otherwise restore rivers and streams to more natural conditions have also increased the frequency of flooding events.
So how can we discern a climate signal - or lack thereof - regarding flooding?
To solve this challenge, scientists have identified and studied the water volume history of primarily natural rivers and streams versus, to discern any changes in water flow and flooding events that may be caused by climate. The studies show there has been no increase in flooding events in such rivers and streams.
A 2009 study in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Water Resources Association reported, "There is broad evidence . for increased magnitudes of low and moderate flows both regionally and nationally." In other words, there is some increase in streamflow during periods of drought and other times when streamflow has been low. But these are not periods of floods. More streamflow during times of drought is actually a good sign.
And what about during times of high streamflow? The study reports, "trends in high flows have been much less evident."
The study further reports, "At a national scale, only a small proportion of the gages measuring dominantly natural streamflow . show upward trends in the annual maximum average daily discharge."
Those results were confirmed four year later in a 2013 study published in the peer-reviewed Hydrological Sciences Journal. "It has not been possible to attribute rain-generated peak streamflow trends to anthropogenic climate change over the past several decades," the study reported.
Moreover, the study observed "no gauge-based evidence has been found for a climate-driven, globally widespread change in the magnitude/frequency of floods during the last decades."
Funny how the Guardian failed to mention that actual scientific evidence debunked the notion that global warming is causing more floods. But that would interfere with a good alarmist climate scare, wouldn't it?
SOURCE
AOC's Green New Deal Posters Look Like Soviet Union Propaganda
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is usually pretty good with her marketing. You may not like what she has to say, but she at least has style.
That's why it makes it all the more bizarre that she chose posters to advocate for her Green New Deal which as if they are right out of the Soviet Union's propaganda machine.
AOC first revealed the posters on Twitter on Friday, and conservatives were quick to point out their likeness to communist flyers of old.
"Surprise! I am thrilled to announce the launch of our #GreenNewDeal art series with custom Bronx & Queens GND posters. The Bronx edition poster will be given for free as a limited release to the public at our Pelham Bay Nature Day & Backpack Giveaway in the Bronx tomorrow," Rep. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
"These posters push us to imagine our future with a Green New Deal in two of our beloved NY-14 parks: Pelham Bay & Flushing Meadows," she added. "All our #GND posters are made in the US, union-printed & will be available for purchase soon, but available at organizing events now."
The Bronx edition poster will be given for free as a limited release to the public at our Pelham Bay Nature Day & Backpack Giveaway in the Bronx tomorrow.
All our #GND posters are made in the US, union-printed & will be available for purchase soon, but available at organizing events now.
Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk pondered, "Why does this seem like something the Soviet Union would post throughout the Red Square?"
The Daily Wire's Harry Khachatrian tweeted, "@AOC shares Soviet Union inspired propaganda posters to promote her `Green New Deal'"
The Washington Examiner's Tom Rogan observed, "These posters have a weirdly Soviet/Maoist/NoKo quality to them."
Even BuzzFeed's Miriam Elder noticed the similarity. "I'm not saying the Green New Deal poster that AOC just tweeted reminds me of the WWII statue in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) but here we are"
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 September, 2019
Dr. Tim Ball Defeats Michael `Hockey Stick' Mann's Climate Lawsuit
The Supreme Court of British Columbia has dismissed Dr. Michael Mann's defamation lawsuit against skeptical Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball. Full legal costs were awarded to Dr. Ball, the defendant in the case.
The Canadian court issued its final ruling in favor of the Dismissal motion that was filed May 2019 by Dr. Tim Ball's libel lawyers.
Mann's "hockey stick" graph, first published in 1998, was featured prominently in the U.N. IPCC 2001 climate report. The graph showed a spike in global average temperature in the 20th Century after about 500 years of stability. Skeptics have long claimed Mann's graph was fraudulent.
Dr. Ball sent an email to WUWT revealing: "Michael Mann's Case Against Me Was Dismissed This Morning By The BC Supreme Court And They Awarded Me [Court] Costs."
Professor Mann is a climate professor at Penn State University. Mann filed his action in 2010 for Ball's allegedly libelous statement that Mann "belongs in the state pen, not Penn State."
The final court ruling, in effect, vindicates Ball's criticisms.
On Feb. 03, 2010, a self-serving and superficial academic `investigation` by Pennsylvania State University had cleared Mann of misconduct. Mann also falsely claimed the NAS found nothing untoward with his work.
But the burden of proof in a court of law is higher.
Not only did the B.C. Supreme Court grant Ball's application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, it also took the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball.
A more detailed public statement from the world-renowned skeptical climatologist is expected in due course.
This extraordinary outcome will likely trigger severe legal repercussions for Dr. Mann in the U.S. and may prove fatal to alarmist climate science claims that modern temperatures are "unprecedented."
According to the leftist The Guardian newspaper (Feb. 09, 2010), the wider importance of Mann's graph over the last 20 years is massive: "Although it was intended as an icon of global warming, the hockey stick has become something else - a symbol of the conflict between mainstream climate scientists and their critics."
SOURCE
It's time to whack greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding
Carbon dioxide does not "endanger" our health - and it's time EPA recognized that simple fact
Tom Harris and Dr. Jay Lehr
On August 6, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (Washington) that it be granted intervenor status concerning litigation launched by environmental groups against the Trump administration's new Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule.
The case in question, American Lung Association v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 19-1140, concerns attempts by environmental groups to strike down the ACE rule and resurrect the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan (CPP). The Chamber wants to be able to intervene in the case in defense of ACE.
The Chamber's focus is on the legal aspects of ACE and CPP, and this will perhaps be valuable. However, it sidesteps the most important issue: both ACE and CPP are unnecessary since they rest on a faulty premise, namely, the misguided notion that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be reduced to avoid a climate crisis.
The appellants for the case, the American Lung Association and American Public Health Association, represented by attorneys from the so-called Clean Air Task Force, certainly pull no punches in their pronouncements. Their July 8 press release alleges that "EPA's decision to repeal the Clean Power Plan and replace it with the ACE rule continues to disregard the vast health consequences of climate change and puts more lives at risk."
That is nonsense, of course. But that didn't stop other groups from taking a similar approach. Carter Roberts, President & CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, said, "This [ACE] rule enables dirty power plants to keep polluting - grounding federal energy policy firmly in the past and saddling future generations with the costs of unchecked climate change." He too apparently wants people to believe the CO2 that we exhale and plants require for photosynthesis is a "dirty pollutant" and the primary factor in driving Earth's climate - more important than the Sun and hundreds of other natural forces that do regulate climate.
Sierra Club director Michael Brune said, "This is an immoral and illegal attack on clean air, clean energy and the health of the public, and it shows just how heartless the Trump administration is when it comes to appeasing its polluter allies."
Environmentalists, Democrats and some state attorneys general dubbed the regulation the "Dirty Power Plan," and more lawsuits against ACE are apparently on the way.
As to clean energy and public health, the forced elimination of fossil fuels that provide over 80% of U.S. and global energy would be devastating to our economies, jobs, living standards, health and welfare. Any forced reduction in atmospheric CO2 levels would negate and roll back the tremendous plant growth that has been "greening" our planet for two decades.
Forcing America to install literally millions of wind turbines and solar panels, and plant tens of millions more acres in biofuel crops, would devastate wildlife habitats and countless species, while driving up electricity prices for families, factories, farms, businesses, schools and hospitals. The wind and sunlight may be free, clean and green. But the massive technologies required to harness those forces for human benefit certainly are not.
If Trump Administration advisors thought they could appease their opponents by implementing a rule focused on the useless and ultimately dangerous goal of limiting CO2 emissions, they were sorely mistaken. But as long as they did not contest the scientifically flawed idea that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant that must be controlled, they really had no choice but to replace the even worse Obama era rule with some form of CO2 reduction regulation.
Dr. Sterling Burnett, Senior Fellow of the Arlington Heights, IL-based Heartland Institute, explained recently on the internet "Think Radio" program Exploratory Journeys: The ACE rule was effectively "forced on the Trump administration because they didn't, at the same time [they drafted the rule], say we are going to re-examine the Endangerment Finding" [EF] - the EPA's 2009 finding that CO2 and other "greenhouse gases" (GHG) somehow endanger the health and welfare of Americans.
"As long as the Endangerment Finding exists," said Burnett, "any administration, no matter how skeptical of the claims that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, . the courts will order them to come up with plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. So, it's time to go back and examine that finding."
It is hard to believe that attacks that would ensue against the current administration for opening the GHG Endangerment Finding to re-examination would be any more severe than what they are already being subjected to by enabling the ACE rule. So there is little, if any, political upside to bringing in a weaker version of Obama's misguided Clean Power Plan.
If you are going to infuriate your opponents to the extent that they will take out lawsuits against you and publicly label you "the worst president in U.S. history for protecting the air and our climate," as Brune did after Trump's July 8 environment speech, you might as well do what you really wanted to do, instead of taking half measures.
Burnett explained that ACE has another serious downside that will limit the Trump EPA going forward.
"ACE is dangerous because it cements for a second time, this time by a Republican, supposedly skeptical administration, the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that needs to be regulated," said Burnett.
"This gives the Endangerment Finding the Trump administration's stamp of public approval, which environmentalists will cite when they fight this in court saying, `even the Trump administration acknowledges carbon dioxide is damaging the U.S., but they are unwilling to take the steps necessary to truly fight carbon pollution.'"
It's time for the Trump administration, the Chamber, and indeed everyone who wants sensible environmental policy to call a spade a spade. Rather than merely engaging their enemies in legal arguments, while fighting activists on their own ground, they should clearly state that CO2 endangers no one and the EF should be reopened.
They should demand that alarmist scientists and advocacy groups prove clearly, with convincing data and evidence, and against vigorous counter evidence and cross examination, that the small manmade portion of atmospheric CO2 and far tinier manmade portions of other greenhouse gases: are dirty and poisonous; control Earth's climate and weather; are doing so to a dangerous and unprecedented degree never experienced in prior Earth or human history; and can be manipulated by the United States and other nations so as to stabilize planetary climate and weather systems that have never been stable.
When the re-examination inevitably reveals that effectively classifying CO2 as a pollutant was a mistake, administration officials should not be quiet about it. They must follow Winston Churchill's advice:
"If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack."
Extremists in the climate change movement clearly hate fossil fuels and apparently humanity. Ridding the world of the inexpensive, life-enhancing fossil fuels would devastate society and especially hurt our working class and poor families, as our standard of living is reduced to that of third world nations. Moreover, the environmental devastation caused by their proposed "solutions" to the supposed climate crisis would be far worse than anything caused by any foreseeable human impact on climate.
It's time to defuse the climate scare at its source. The greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding must be given a tremendous whack, and sent to the dustbin of history.
Via email
They're Coming For Your Hamburgers: Bernie Backs Meat Tax To Combat Climate Change
Not content with stealing the money from productive citizens to fund their scams like reparations and freebies for Millenials and stomping on free speech with the jackboot of forced diversity, the socialists now want to tell everybody what to eat too.
Senator Bernie Sanders who has gone from an obscure crank to the American Lenin in a few short years has said that he is on board with a tax on meat much to the joy of vegans with an authoritarian streak.
During a campaign stop in South Carolina on Friday, the communist cadaver responded to a question that if he is elected president that he would shakedown everyone in the USA with a federal tax on meat.
"As you probably know, animal agriculture is to blame for the majority of climate change and is the leading cause of deforestation, water and air pollution, and biodiversity loss. With that being known, what do you plan on doing to ensure that Americans limit their consumption of animal products?" a constituent asked Sanders at a campaign event in South Carolina. "Germany has imposed a meat tax in hopes of limiting this consumption," she continued. "What are your plans to stop these large corporations from further usurping natural resources and polluting the planet?"
Sanders replied, "All I can say is if we believe, as I do and you do, that climate change is real then we are going to have to tackle it in every single area including agriculture, ok? And in fact, one of the things we want to do with our farmers out there is help them become more aggressive and able to help us combat climate change rather than contribute to it."
"So we will certainly - you're right," he added. "We've got to look at agriculture, we've got to look at every cause of the crisis that we face."
Comrade Bernie isn't the only Democrat running for president to hint that if elected that he would use the power of the government to go after meat-eaters, Beto O'Rourke and Cory Booker - who is an actual vegan - have openly linked meat to climate change.
There is already a propaganda campaign in the works against meat, CNN among others has promoted a report by the globalist World Resources Institute pushing Americans to "cut back" on eating hamburgers which would become a reality if Sanders and his ilk tax beef out of the affordability range.
The punitive tax would put the screws on citizens who would be coerced into becoming vegans and aligns with the new craze of fake meat as in meatless burgers that many of the nation's fast food chains are adopting to appeal to millennials.
KFC is rolling out meatless chicken as a new front on the left's war on Chick-fil-A is about to be opened with economic terrorism in the form of pressure campaigns and boycotts. You know it's coming.
Like communism, climate change has become the central organizing principle for an ever more dangerous and ideological left who want to enforce their warped ideas on people who don't think like them.
They want to strip Americans of their freedom to make their own decisions and put power into the hands of an authoritarian government that the socialists will control.
SOURCE
The Great Barrier Reef is not dead ... long live the reef
By Sussan Ley (Sussan Ley is the Australian federal Minister for the Environment)
A fortnight ago I was on the reef, not with climate sceptics but with scientists, the country's lead reef agencies, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the Australian Institute of Marine Science and accredited master reef guides.
Their advice was clear: the Reef isn't dead. It has vast areas of vibrant coral and teeming sea life, just as it has areas that have been damaged by coral bleaching, illegal fishing and crown of thorns outbreaks.
To help the reef, its wildlife and the 64,000 jobs it supports, we need to recognise both realities.
There are those who will not be happy unless we declare the reef dead in the name of climate change, just as there are those who want to claim that nothing out of the ordinary is taking place. As a minister who respects the science, who has consulted over many weeks with reef experts from the park authority, the Institute of Marine Science and the innovative Great Barrier Reef Foundation, I do not subscribe to either position.
We have the best managed reef ecosystem in the world. We have a massive job to do in protecting its future and we are getting on with that job.
The Great Barrier Reef covers some 346,000 square kilometres and the tourism experience you will find snorkelling from Cairns and other locations such as the Whitsundays remains awe-inspiring. The reef is showing us that it has the capacity to regenerate from impacts such as cyclones, bleaching and crown of thorns starfish outbreaks.
But it also faces enormous challenges if we do not take action. Reducing threats from rising sea temperatures, poor water quality and crown of thorns outbreaks are critical in protecting its future.
I trust the scientists who tell me that climate change is the biggest single threat to the reef, just as I trust those who tell me of the things we can do, and are doing, to make the reef more resilient.
The Morrison government is taking meaningful action to reduce global emissions. The $3.5 billion Climate Solutions Package will deliver the 328 million tonnes of abatement needed to meet our 2030 Paris target.
From an environment perspective, my focus is on the things we can do on the reef and in its catchment, from the work with farmers addressing water quality to the protection of marine park areas, the control of crown of thorns starfish, collaboration with local communities and traditional owners, and the investment in new technology to improve coral spawning success and adaptation to warmer environments.
The federal government is investing $1.2billion in the reef, including $443 million through the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, which will in turn attract significant private-sector investment in innovative reef protection partnerships. Already there are some significant gains in terms of crown of thorns control, partnerships with landholders and increased marine park compliance and surveillance.
The full benefit of many investments and management strategies already under way in the park are still to be realised through our monitoring systems.
We need to continue to accelerate our actions in these areas, as well as invest in steps to reduce plastic and waste in our waterways.
The Australian and Queensland governments' Reef 2050 Plan - endorsed by the United Nations World Heritage Committee - is a world-leading strategy for a marine protected area. I hope to see it gain more momentum as we work in partnership with all tiers of government, the private sector, NGOs, traditional owners and the wider community.
The Australian and Queensland governments are investing $2 billion in the future of the reef, working with many partners including independent scientific panels, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the CSIRO.
Our investment in innovation through the foundation has enormous potential to deliver forward-looking conservation projects for the reef, with significant scope for private sector partnerships.
This is anything but a head-in-the-sand approach and it is in stark contrast to those who would rather rush to declare the reef dead than look at the steps we can take - and are taking - to preserve it into the future.
SOURCE
How The Media Destroyed Rational Climate Debate
Roy W Spencer PhD
An old mantra of the news business is, "if it bleeds, it leads." If someone was murdered, it is news. That virtually no one gets murdered is not news.
That, by itself, should tell you that the mainstream media cannot be relied upon as an unbiased source of climate change information.
There are lots of self-proclaimed climate experts now. They don't need a degree in physics or atmospheric science. For credentials, they only need to care and tell others they care. They believe the Earth is being murdered by humans and want the media to spread the word.
Most people do not have the time or educational background to understand the global warming debate, and so defer to the consensus of experts on the subject. The trouble is that no one ever says exactly what the experts agree upon.
When you dig into the details, what the experts agree upon in their official pronouncements is rather unremarkable.
The Earth has warmed a little since the 1950s, a date chosen because before that humans had not produced enough CO2 to really matter.
Not enough warming for most people to actually feel, but enough for thermometers to pick up the signal buried in the noise of natural weather swings of many tens of degrees and spurious warming from urbanization effects.
The UN consensus is that most of that warming is probably due to increasing atmospheric CO2 from fossil-fuel use (but we really don't know for sure).
For now, I tend to agree with this consensus. And still, I am widely considered a climate denier. Why? Because I am not willing to exaggerate and make claims that cannot be supported by data.
Take researcher Roger Pielke, Jr. as another example. Roger considers himself an environmentalist. He generally agrees with the predictions of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding future warming.
But as an expert in severe weather damages, he isn't willing to support the lie that severe weather has gotten worse. Yes, storm damages have increased, but that's because we keep building more infrastructure to get damaged. So, he too is considered a climate denier.
What gets reported by the media about global warming (aka climate change, the climate crisis, and now the climate emergency) is usually greatly exaggerated, half-truths, or just plain nonsense.
Just like the economy and economists, it is not difficult to find an expert willing to provide a prediction of gloom and doom. That makes interesting news. But it distorts the public perception of the dangers of climate change. And because it is reported as "science", it is equated with truth.
In the case of climate change news, the predicted effects are almost universally biased toward Armageddon-like outcomes. Severe weather events that have always occurred (tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, droughts) are now reported with at least some blame placed on your SUV.
The major media outlets have so convinced themselves of the justness, righteousness, and truthfulness of their cause that they have banded together to make sure the climate emergency is not ignored.
As reported by The Guardian, "More than 60 news outlets worldwide have signed on to Covering Climate Now, a project to improve coverage of the emergency".
The exaggerations are not limited to just science. The reporting on engineering related to proposed alternative sources of energy (e.g. wind and solar) is also biased.
The reported economics are biased. Unlimited "free" energy is claimed to be all around us, just waiting to be plucked from the unicorn tree.
And for most of America (and the world), the reporting is not making us smarter, but dumber.
Why does it matter? Who cares if the science (or engineering or economics) is exaggerated if the result is that we stop polluting?
Besides the fact that there is no such thing as a non-polluting energy source, it matters because humanity depends upon abundant, affordable energy to prosper. Just Google life expectancy and per capita energy use. Prosperous societies are healthier and enjoy longer lives.
Expensive sources of energy forced upon the masses by governmental fiat kill poor people simply because expensive energy exacerbates poverty, and poverty leads to premature death.
As philosopher Alex Epstein writes in his book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, if you believe humans have a right to thrive, then you should be supportive of fossil fuels.
We don't use wind and solar energy because it is economically competitive. We use it because governments have decided to force taxpayers to pay the extra costs involved and allowed utilities to pass on the higher costs to consumers.
Wind and solar use continue to grow, but global energy demand grows even faster. Barring some new energy technology (or a renewed embrace of nuclear power), wind and solar are unlikely to supply more than 10% of global energy demand in the coming decades.
And as some European countries have learned, mandated use of solar and wind comes at a high cost to society.
Not only the media, but the public education system is complicit in this era of sloppy science reporting. I suppose most teachers and journalists believe what they are teaching and reporting on. But they still bear some responsibility for making sure what they report is relatively unbiased and factual.
I would much rather have teachers spending more time teaching students how to think and less time teaching them what to think.
Climate scientists are not without blame. They, like everyone else, are biased. Virtually all Earth scientists I know view the Earth as "fragile". Their biases affect their analysis of uncertain data that can be interpreted in multiple ways.
Most are relatively clueless about engineering and economics. I've had discussions with climate scientists who tell me, "Well, we need to get away from fossil fuels, anyway."
And maybe we do, eventually. But exaggerating the threat can do more harm than good. The late Stephen Schneider infamously admitted to biased reporting by scientists. You can read his entire quote and decide for yourself whether scientists like Dr. Schneider let their worldview, politics, etc., color how they present their science to the public.
The unauthorized release of the `ClimateGate' emails between IPCC scientists showed how the alarmist narrative was maintained by undermining alternative views and even pressuring the editors of scientific journals.
Even The Guardian seemed shocked by the misbehavior.
It's fine to present the possibility that human-caused global warming could be very damaging, which is indeed theoretically possible. But to claim that large and damaging changes have already occurred due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is shoddy journalism.
Some reporters get around the problem by saying that the latest hurricane might not be blamed on global warming directly, but it represents what we can expect more of in a warming world. Except that, even the UN IPCC is equivocal on the subject.
Sea level rise stories in the media, as far as I can tell, never mention that sea level has been rising naturally for as long as we have had global tide gauge measurements (since the 1850s).
Maybe humans are responsible for a portion of the recent rise, but as is the case for essentially all climate reporting, the role of nature is seldom mentioned, and the size of the problem is almost always exaggerated.
That worsening periodic tidal flooding in Miami Beach is about 50% due to sinking of reclaimed swampland is never mentioned.
There are no human fingerprints of global warming. None. Climate change is simply assumed to be mostly human-caused (which is indeed possible), while our knowledge of natural climate change is almost non-existent.
Computerized climate models are programmed based upon the assumption of human causation. The models produce human-caused climate change because they are forced to produce no warming (be in a state of `energy balance') unless CO2 is added to them.
As far as we know, no one has ever been killed by human-caused climate change. Weather-related deaths have fallen dramatically - by over 90% - in the last 100 years.
Whose child has been taught that in school? What journalist has been brave enough to report that good news?
In recent years I've had more and more people tell me that their children, grandchildren, or young acquaintances are now thoroughly convinced we are destroying the planet with our carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
They've had this message drilled into their brains through news reporting, movies, their teachers and professors, their favorite celebrities, and a handful of outspoken scientists and politicians whose knowledge of the subject is a mile wide but only inches deep.
In contrast, few people are aware of the science papers showing satellite observations that reveal a global greening phenomenon is occurring as a result of more atmospheric CO2.
Again I ask, whose child has been taught this in school? What journalist dares to report any positive benefits of CO2, without which life on Earth would not exist? No, if it's climate news, it's all bad news, all the time.
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 September, 2019
California "logic"
Climate hysteria is a great opportunity to teach children to ask questions
Most adults have little or no time to investigate the claims about climate change. They either accept them, assuming that "authority figures" have done their homework, or sit on the fence.
Some consider that only scientists are supposed to understand science. But everyone has an equal place at the table of science and if our questions are not answered or the evidence doesn't stack up, we are free to reject that "science".
Climate alarm has long given up the pretence of any link to science. Millions have been successfully "converted" - and they get duly worked up if their belief is questioned: "have you been outside recently?", "erratic climate events are everywhere!", "rainfall is getting less every year!", "flash floods, including in Rajasthan are clear proof!".
Some of them have gone to the next stage and become missionaries. They go about distributing their religious pamphlets in schools, indoctrinating innocent lower-IQ children. Hopelessly confused children like Greta Thunberg are being churned out as a result. At an age when children like her should be learning to ask questions, they have become the brainwashed front for the climate religion. There is little difference between such "committed" youth and Hitler's Youth or the youth churned out by ISIS's madrassas.
In my view, if anyone tells a child that climate change is man-made just because someone says so (such as a missionary "scientist" but now increasingly, "royals" and "celebrities"), that person has committed a sin against the enlightenment, against human progress.
I would personally have been supportive of Greta Thunberg if she had been a prodigally intelligent child who dazzled her teachers with amazing questions, then found the answers and was now promoting a view that she thoroughly understood. It would not matter to me that she had come to the wrong conclusion. After all, no one can be right on everything all the time. But she suffers, sadly, from mental issues and speaks as a missionary - she cannot answer a single question about the science.
We are very prone as a species to superstitions, panics, delusions, manias and hysterias. We have gone through thousands of them (many still underway), such as religion, alchemy, witchcraft, astrology, phrenology, eugenics, the Y2K bug, the SARS panic, much of Ayurveda and Chinese traditional medicine and all of homeopathy.
The climate hysteria will ultimately pass, but to avoid such hysterias in the future we need to get our children to start thinking and stop believing. Climate change is a superb topic for teachers and students to explore.
I stumbled upon the ideas of Socrates and Voltaire when I was a child and since the age of twelve, I have been a deep sceptic. "God" would have to pass through a thousand hurdles if "He" came by and tried to make me believe. For example, I recall being the only one staring into the eyes of Sathya Sai Baba in Bangalore in 1981 when all others had prostrated themselves before him. He obviously failed to pull a fast one over me. Today, Michael Strong, author of The Habit of Thought, is one of the few educationists who actively uses the Socratic method. Our educationists must learn from him.
I believe that children from age 10 onwards should attend one class each week only on questions. They should list various topics and then ask as many questions as they can on that topic. As they grow older their ability to ask questions will get deeper and more sophisticated.
The topic of climate change can lead to many questions. What is climate? What factors impact the climate? (Answer: at least a few hundred). How is the Earth's temperature measured? (Long-term quality thermometer measurements have only been available in a few European and American sites, with most of them now contaminated by urbanisation. Let children also ask about satellite measurements and about the only reliable surface measurements - from the US Climate Reference Network.)
How is the sea level measured? (Let them ask whether the land itself can sink - indeed it does: it is very common.) What is the proof of the greenhouse gas effect? (Let them ask and find out that there is no robust way to prove it in a laboratory.) How is CO2 measured?
What information is needed to confirm (or reject) the CO2 hypothesis? What is the correlation between CO2 and temperature over the recent past? (Answer: very little.) What is the correlation as we stretch out to hundreds and then millions of years? (Answer: zero.) What climate "model" predictions could prove the hypothesis? What would nullify it?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of temperature and CO2 estimates of the past? (Eg tree rings, ice core, marine sediments, pollen. Tree ring data is a better measure of rainfall than of temperature, ice cores show that CO2 increased when the Earth's wobbles first made it warmer - CO2 was thereafter ejected from the oceans.)
Are extreme events increasing? Let the children read IPCC's reports that say: "there is only low confidence regarding changes in global tropical cyclone numbers over the last four decades", there is "low confidence that anthropogenic climate change has affected the frequency and the magnitude of floods" and that there is a "decreasing trend in the global number of tropical cyclones and globally accumulated cyclonic energy".
Let them then ask about the costs and benefits of CO2. Let them read IPCC's reports which show no economic harm. Let them understand that CO2 is plant food so it gives us a lot of benefits. Let them ask: what other competing scientific hypotheses exist to explain the slight increase in temperature since 1800?
This topic is not going away any time soon. So let's use it as an opportunity to train children to ask questions. Einstein was smart not because of his intelligence but because he asked questions.
Children should also be asked to watch magic shows on Youtube, such as the Penn and Teller show and James Randi's work. Let them, thereafter, discuss in the class how easy it is to fool even adults. Let their blind "respect" for adults' "wisdom" drop a notch each day as they grow older.
SOURCE (hat-tip: GWPF Newsletter 29/8/19)
E.P.A. to Roll Back Regulations on Methane, a Potential Greenhouse Gas
The Trump administration laid out on Thursday a far-reaching plan to cut back on the regulation of methane emissions, a major contributor to climate change.
The Environmental Protection Agency's proposed rule aims to eliminate federal requirements that oil and gas companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage facilities. It would also reopen the question of whether the E.P.A. had the legal authority to regulate methane as a pollutant.
The rollback plan is particularly notable because major energy companies have, in fact, spoken out against it - joining automakers, electric utilities and other industrial giants that have opposed other administration initiatives to dismantle climate-change and environmental rules.
The weakening of the methane standard is the latest in the march of environmental-policy rollbacks by the Trump administration designed to loosen regulations on industry.
Mr. Trump has sought to open millions of acres of public land and water to drilling, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has lifted an Obama-era moratorium on new coal mining leases on public land. This month, the Interior Department completed a plan to weaken the Endangered Species Act. Later this year the E.P.A. plans to roll back clean-water regulations affecting streams and wetlands.
E.P.A. officials said the new methane rule, which would replace one from the Obama administration, is a response to Mr. Trump's calls to trim regulations that impede economic growth or keep the nation reliant on energy imports. The plan "removes unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens from the oil and gas industry," said the E.P.A. administrator, Andrew Wheeler. "The Trump administration recognizes that methane is valuable and the industry has an incentive to minimize leaks and maximize its use."
Mr. Wheeler noted that since 1990, natural gas production in the United States has almost doubled while methane emissions across the industry have fallen 15 percent.
Anne Idsal, the agency's acting senior clean-air official, said that elimination of the Obama-era rules would have "minimal environmental benefits."
Environmental advocates described the proposal as a major setback in the effort to fight climate change. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.
"The Trump E.P.A. is eager to give the oil and gas industry a free pass to keep leaking enormous amounts of climate pollution into the air," said David Doniger, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. "If E.P.A. moves forward with this reckless and sinister proposal, we will see them in court."
Under the proposal, methane, the main component of natural gas, would be only indirectly regulated. A separate but related category of gases, known as volatile organic compounds, would remain regulated under the new rule, and those curbs would have the side benefit of averting some methane emissions.
The new rule must go through a period of public comment and review, and would most likely be finalized early next year, analysts said.
SOURCE
Airport's Ban on Plastic Water Bottles a Flight of Fancy
Politicians in California like to show how much they care about making the world a better place by banning things. Making the world a better place isn't something they seem to care much about, however, because if they did, they would be doing very different things.
As Exhibit A, please consider San Francisco's new ban on sales of bottled water at the city's international airport, which just took effect on August 20, 2019. The Wall Street Journal`s Andy Kessler considers a scenario that may become all too common thanks to the city's new law aimed at inconveniencing air travelers passing through SFO:
After running late for your flight after a 30-minute security line only to have TSA confiscate your Fiji water bottle, you'll now have to stop at a crowded water fountain to fill your own metal flask. Or buy an overpriced glass or aluminum bottle at the concession stand, paying another 10 cents for a bag. And your teeth will chatter if you drink through a paper straw. Of course you could risk dehydration instead: Men lose up to a half-gallon of water during a 10-hour flight. Oddly, you can still buy sugary drinks in plastic bottles at SFO; only healthy, calorie-free water is banned in plastic. You can't make this stuff up.
It's not that city officials don't like the idea of people buying overpriced bottled drinks at the city-owned airport. Rather, it's the idea of people buying water in plastic bottles that upsets them-especially because of what they seem to think happens with all those bottles after air travelers drink the water in them.
The San Francisco Chronicle`s Dustin Gardiner quotes state senator Scott Wiener's justification for state politicians' efforts to ban all things plastic in California:
"Plastics are frankly strangling the health of our oceans," Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said as the Senate debated SB54 last month. "This is a huge problem, and it's time to move past baby steps to address it."
A huge problem, indeed. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, over 8 million metric tons of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year. If California's politicians think they are going to have a meaningful impact in solving that problem with the actions they take, they must also think Californians are major contributors to that problem.
Are they really?
A study by Germany's Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research suggests that over 90 percent of all the plastic waste in the ocean flows into it from just 10 rivers. Alex Gray of the World Economic Forum reports:
By analyzing the waste found in the rivers and surrounding landscape, researchers were able to estimate that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean.
Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa - the Nile and the Niger.
According to National Geographic, "relatively little plastic waste enters the ocean from North America and Europe because of their more robust waste-management systems."
Californians may not be as environmentally destructive as state politicians believe.
But perhaps that's not true in San Francisco, if politicians from that city think their latest ban on sales of water in plastic bottles at the city's airport will have a noticeable impact on the global problem of plastic waste being dumped in the oceans.
Let's play pretend and say that instead of disposing four million plastic water bottles with a robust waste-management system, San Francisco's politicians allow city employees at the airport to dump the bottles into San Francisco Bay each year to flow out into the Pacific Ocean and add to the global plastic waste problem.
Before the ban took effect, San Francisco's airport was selling 4 million water bottles each year. Assuming all were half-liter containers, each weighing 9.3 grams, that amount of plastic bottle waste would total 37.2 metric tons. If the public employees of the airport were dumping that many empty plastic water bottles into San Francisco Bay, it would account for 0.000465 percent of all the plastic waste flowing into the world's oceans each year.
An effective solution to that hypothetical problem wouldn't be to ban the sale of water in plastic bottles at the airport. It would be to establish and operate an effective waste management system for the city while also banning the city's employees from dumping empty water bottles into the bay. If they already had done all that, why not focus on making their system work better?
Do you suppose that common sense solution occurred to the politicians? Or do you suppose they cared more about showing how much they care about the environment without really caring enough to do anything to noticeably improve it, regardless of whatever harm and inconvenience they might impose upon the dignity of air travelers passing through the city's airport?
SOURCE
Most coral `far from sediment danger'
Run-off of sediment from farms seldom reaches the outer Great Barrier Reef, or areas where the vast majority of corals live, the head of the Australian Institute of Marine Science has said.
However, AIMS chief executive Paul Hardisty said increased nutrients were a problem for some areas and long-term monitoring showed the Great Barrier Reef was under stress.
Water quality on the outer reef has been a central issue raised by scientist Peter Ridd, who is undertaking a controversial speaking tour through Queensland sugarcane growing areas.
Dr Ridd is calling for better quality assurance checks for reef science before new laws are introduced that affect farmers along the Queensland coast.
Dr Hardisty said the reef was a complex ecosystem of 3000 reefs, including near-shore reefs, mid-shelf reefs 20km to 40km offshore, and outer-shelf reefs 100km to 200km offshore. He said there was a natural improvement in water quality from inshore to offshore reefs.
"Mid-shelf and offshore reefs typically have better water quality as these regions are flushed more frequently with waters from the Coral Sea," he said.
"When it comes to water quality on the Great Barrier Reef, -researchers agree it is uncommon for sediment plumes to regularly reach outer-shelf reefs.
"The inner-shelf and mid-shelf reefs, particularly those close to large rivers in the wet tropics, experience more frequent exposure to flood plumes of dissolved and suspended material."
Extra nutrients can come from many conditions, including river outflows which can be enhanced by agricultural or industrial -activity.
Dr Hardisty said studies had shown fine particles of nutrient-enriched and organic-rich sediment could settle on inshore and mid-shelf reefs during calm -periods and had the potential to kill young corals within 48 hours and adult corals in three to seven days, depending on species.
An AIMS spokeswoman said inshore reefs included popular tourist destinations such as Green Island and Fitzroy Islands off Cairns, Magnetic Island off Townsville, and Hayman and Hook islands in the Whitsundays.
She said about 80 per cent of the reefs were platform reefs on the mid- and outer-continental shelf, while about 600 reefs (20 per cent) were near-shore, -either as fringing reefs around continental islands and along the mainland coast, or as small -detached platform reefs.
Dr Ridd said Dr Hardisty's comments supported his claim that there was "almost no land-derived sediment on the Great Barrier Reef where 99 per cent of corals live".
"Nutrients are not measurably different on the Great Barrier Reef to the Pacific Ocean and farm fertilisers are almost irrelevant," he said. "For years AIMS and others have been going on about the inshore reefs and the term implies to the unsuspecting layman that it is a third or maybe even a half of the coral (inshore vs offshore). They have never come clean about what fraction the -inshore reefs are."
Dr Ridd is midway through a lecture tour along the Queensland coast promoted by sugarcane and farm groups concerned about water quality legislation before the Queensland parliament. The tour has provoked strong criticism from environment and reef groups.
The Australian Coral Reef -Society said Dr Ridd ignored inshore reefs, as if they were not an important component of the World Heritage Area and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
"This is convenient for his -argument that there are no water-quality problems for the Great Barrier Reef, discounting the hundreds of published papers investigating and reporting on these problems," the society said.
"He also incorrectly suggests areas like the Whitsundays are not important parts of the Great Barrier Reef, despite the huge tourism industry in such areas.''
SOURCE
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1 September, 2019
Australia downgrades outlook for Great Barrier Reef to 'very poor'
OK. I guess I should say something about this rubbish, as nobody else is stepping up to the plate so far. For a start, note that this is prophecy, not a factual report. They are prophesying that the reef will deteriorate. Given the erratic influences on the reef (unpredictable cyclones, unpredictable starfish attacks, sea-level oscillations etc), this is simply a stab in the dark. Many things could happen and nobody knows which will.
Secondly this is not a report of any objective measurements. It is "based on a qualitative assessment of the available evidence." Note: qualitative, not quantitative. It is in short simply an expression of opinion from people with a vested interest in alarm
And pointing the skinger of forn at global warming is the silliest thing of all. Where does the reef flourish best? Where does it display the greatest biodiversity? In the far tropics. In the WARMEST parts of the reef waters. Corals LIKE warmth. Global warming would be GOOD for the reef. We live among madmen
Australia downgraded the Great Barrier Reef's long-term outlook to "very poor" for the first time on Friday, as the world heritage site struggles with "escalating" climate change.
In its latest five-yearly report on the health of the world's largest coral reef system, the government's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority singled out rising sea temperatures as the biggest threat to the giant organism.
"The significant and large-scale impacts from record-breaking sea surface temperatures have resulted in coral reef habitat transitioning from poor to very poor condition," the government agency said.
"Climate change is escalating and is the most significant threat to the Region's long-term outlook.
"Significant global action to address climate change is critical to slowing deterioration of the Reef's ecosystem and heritage values and supporting recovery," it said.
But the agency added that the threats to the 2,300-kilometre (1,400-mile) reef were "multiple, cumulative and increasing" and, in addition to warming seas, included agricultural run-off and coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.
The agency said the outlook downgrade from "poor" in 2014 to "very poor" now reflected the greater expanse of coral deterioration across the massive reef, notably following back-to-back coral bleaching events caused by sea temperature spikes in 2016 and 2017.
"The window of opportunity to improve the reef's long-term future is now," it said.
The conservative Australian government has faced criticism from environmentalists for favouring an expansion of its massive coal mining and export industry over action to curb climate change.
The United Nations had asked to receive the latest update on the reef's health by December so that it can determine whether the site can retain its world heritage status when UNESCO next considers the issue in 2020.
The reef is estimated to be worth at least $4 billion (œ3.3 bn) a year to the Australian economy - serving as a magnet for tourists and emblem of the country.
SOURCE
The Coming Climate Change Propaganda Tsunami
Batten down the hatches! Yet another tsunami of global warming and "clean energy" propaganda is approaching!
On September 23, United Nations Secretary-General Ant¢nio Guterres will host the 2019 Climate Action Summit at UN headquarters. Guterres is calling on all leaders to come to New York City with "concrete, realistic plans" to increase their greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction pledges "in line with reducing GHG emissions by 45 per cent over the next decade, and to net zero emissions by 2050."
The goal is to "hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2øC", lessen sea level rise, reduce extreme weather, and other impossible objectives. The UN warns:
[T]he last four years were the four hottest on record, and winter temperatures in the Arctic have risen by 3øC since 1990. Sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying, and we are starting to see the life-threatening impact of climate change on health, through air pollution, heatwaves and risks to food security."
This is all either nonsense or irrelevant (for example, sea level has been rising, at times much faster than today, for the past 15,000 years). But this won't stop civil society, businesses, organizations, youth and other representatives from the public at large from joining heads of states and government from UN member states at the summit in demanding that we make "massive movements in the real economy in support of the [climate change] agenda," to quote from the summit website. Currently sailing across the Atlantic on her way to address the conference is 16-year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg in what she erroneously dubs a "zero-carbon" yacht. Thunberg is being brought in to help the U.S. climate delusion movement and to recruit more well-meaning but naive children into its ranks.
AOC-Aligned Climate Group Demands Media Silence 'Climate Deniers'
To prime the public to be ready to accept their demands, we can expect increasingly dire announcements about the supposed climate catastrophe unfolding around us. Since, as Mark Twain is credited with saying, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes," let's get a bit ahead of the game and start to debunk one of the claims that is almost certain to come out next week.
Just as at the end of July, we will likely soon hear that August temperatures either set a record or were close to it. But an examination of the problems with the July `record' will help us defuse this claim even before it is made. For "global temperature" records are generally meaningless, and the one for last month is especially so.
Strictly speaking, it is no more meaningful to calculate the average temperature for the whole planet than it is to calculate the average telephone number in a phone book. Like viscosity and density, and of course phone numbers, temperature is not something that can be meaningfully averaged. "Global temperature" does not exist.
In their award-winning book, Taken by Storm (2007), Canadian researchers Dr. Christopher Essex and Dr. Ross McKitrick explain: "Temperature is not an amount of something [like height or weight]. It is a number that represents the condition of a physical system. In thermodynamics it is known as an intensive quantity, in contrast to quantities like energy, which have an additive property, which we call extensive in thermodynamics."
Even if you could calculate some sort of meaningful global temperature statistic, and indeed, if you did, interpreting its significance would be difficult, the figure would be unimportant. No one and nothing would experience it directly since we all live in relatively small regions, not the globe. There is no superbeing straddling the planet, detecting global averages in temperature. Global warming does not matter.
And, of course, it was only 1978 when we launched satellites to determine the temperature distribution of our atmosphere. Up until then, and still mostly today, we collect temperatures around the globe in a rather spotty and often inaccurate manner. When meteorologist Anthony Watts went about obtaining photographs of 1200 temperature stations in the United States, the best-covered area in the world, he found that about 80% were near useless because of their proximity to objects that bias the readings, such as air conditioning units, highways, and operating equipment. They were likely not present when the stations were first established, but they rendered many of the readings to that point useless.
Reporting for RealClear Energy, James Taylor, senior fellow, Environment and Energy Policy, for the Arlington, Illinois-based Heartland Institute, describes the results of the new (since January 2005) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Reference Network (USCRN). USCRN includes 114 well-located and maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states. Taylor writes: "USCRN temperature stations show no warming since 2005 when the network went online. If anything, U.S. temperatures are now slightly cooler than they were 14 years ago [see graph below, where temperature is in degrees Fahrenheit on the left]."
Taylor concludes: "Climate crisis advocates attempt to dismiss the minor satellite-measured warming by utilizing ground temperature stations around the globe, which tend to have even more corrupting biases and problems than the old U.S. stations."
There are, of course, huge regions of the Earth that have no land surface temperature data at all. There is very little data for the 70 percent of Earth's surface that is ocean. There is also little data for mountainous and desert regions, not to mention the Antarctic. And, despite the fact that NOAA claimed that central, equatorial Africa was much hotter than usual in July (see first figure below), in reality they had practically no data for the region at all (see second figure below). The high central African temperatures were merely extrapolated from data measured hundreds of miles away.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts explained one of the problems with this approach:
When station data is used to extrapolate over distance, any errors in the source data will get magnified and spread over a large area.
For example, say the nearest station is 400 miles away, at an airport in a city, but they are trying to use that data to extrapolate for the African savannah. The are basically adding the Urban Heat Island of the city to a wide area of the Savanah.
As an illustration, Watts contrasts a July temperature map of 250 KM "smoothing radius" with one with 1200 KM "smoothing radius." The first (the first figure below) does not extrapolate temperature data over much of the African savannah (where little real data exists) and results in a global temperature anomaly of 0.88øC. The second (the second figure below), which extends over the Savanah, results in a global temperature anomaly of 0.92øC.
Watts concludes, "Statistically induced warming is not real."
Regardless, the hot spot NOAA computed for central equatorial Africa is almost certainly imaginary since, as climate data analyst Tony Heller said, "NOAA shows July record heat in Central Africa, in regions which UAH [University of Alabama at Huntsville] satellite data showed close to or slightly above normal" (see figure below).
As if that were not enough to dismiss the whole "warmest month ever" arguments, a quick look at the temperature data on the NOAA web site tells us that none of their grand announcements make any sense. Consider first that, according to NOAA, July 2019 set the record of the warmest month by0.03øC for combined global land and ocean surface temperature. But the uncertainty is listed as 0.17øC, or almost six times the amount by which the record was supposedly set. In fact, July 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015 all fall within the 0.17øC error bar of July 2019. Therefore, we cannot know which year set the record.
We also sense something fishy is going on when we notice that the July 2019 temp anomaly at 0.95øC above the 20th-century average is exactly (to the second decimal place) the same as the year to date (YTD) temperature anomaly. Unbelievably, it is also exactly the same, 0.95øC, for June and the YTD for June. Four numbers all the same to the second decimal point. How is that possible? It is as if someone in the agency decided that it would be easier for media to get it right if all these numbers were exactly the same. And so, apparently, they made it so.
The public needs to take a highly skeptical view of the inevitable dire warnings that we will soon see in advance of the 2019 Climate Action Summit. The real goal has more to do with restricting our freedom, in particular, our access to inexpensive fossil fuels.
SOURCE (See the original for links and graphics)
NASA: Area burned by global wildfires dropped by 25% since 2003
Climate activists often warn that global warming is stoking forest fires, but it turns out the amount of land burned by wildfires worldwide has plummeted by 25% since 2003, according to NASA.
NASA's Earth Observatory found that the number of total square kilometers burned globally each year has decreased steadily from 2003-19, based on data collected by Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers (MODIS) on satellites.
NASA Goddard Space Flight scientist Niels Andela attributed the decline to increased farming in areas of the Global South and the use of machines instead of prescribed burns to clear crops.
"As populations have increased in fire-prone regions of Africa, South America, and Central Asia, grasslands and savannas have become more developed and converted into farmland," the NASA post said. "As a result, longstanding habits of burning grasslands (to clear shrubs and land for cattle or other reasons) have decreased."
Even as the acreage consumed by wildfires declined, James Randerson, University of California Irvine earth sciences professor, said climate change has played a role by making wildfires more intense.
"There are really two separate trends," Mr. Randerson said. "Even as the global burned area number has declined because of what is happening in savannas, we are seeing a significant increase in the intensity and reach of fires in the western United States because of climate change."
Despite the increase in farming, the amount of forest area worldwide grew by 2.24 million square kilometers from 1982-2016, as a net loss in the tropics was "outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics," according to a November study in Nature.
"Forests are making a comeback!" said Bates College visiting assistant economics professor Vincent Geloso in a Monday post on the American Institute for Economic Research. "More precisely, the tree cover of the planet is increasing."
A reminder that while some forests in the world are being destroyed, there is a global recovery of the tree cover because of tree farming and increased agricultural productivity (i.e. peak farmland) #amazonhttps://t.co/ZdCpWYFupM #econtwitter
- Vincent (Economic History) Geloso (@VincentGeloso) August 28, 2019
The Amazon fires, part of the annual dry-season burn-off by farmers clearing crop land, have stoked alarm about the loss of the rainforest and "the world's lungs," although scientists have debunked the oft-repeated claim that losing the Amazon would result in a 20% drop in global oxygen.
The number of Amazon fires is about 80% higher than at the same time last year, but 2018 was also a low fire year. This year's fires are about 7% higher than the 10-year average, as reported by Forbes, based on data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.
SOURCE
The Ugly Side Of The Pursuit for `Sustainability'
Los Angeles County has adopted a "sustainability" program that officials expect "to enhance the well-being of every community in the county while reducing damage to the natural environment and adapting to the changing climate." This is considered smart. By people who should know better.
Our smartest should know central planning has never worked and never will. Yet the project has been met with gushing approval. It's "bold," "ambitious," "progressive," "forward thinking," and a "model" for other big cities.
The program, called "OurCounty," has 12 goals, 37 strategies, and 159 "actions." Among the dozen objectives, overflowing with green buzzwords, are a "fossil fuel-free L.A. County," "resilient and healthy community environments," "equitable and sustainable land use," "thriving ecosystems, habitats, and biodiversity," the "sustainable production and consumption of resources," and, to advance the state's road diet agenda, "a convenient, safe, clean, and affordable transportation system that enhances mobility and quality of life while reducing car dependency."
The plan also includes, says Sean Hecht, co-executive director of UCLA's Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, a plan consultant, "economic sustainability, with the broader goal of equity," because no green deal, new or otherwise, would be complete without plans for the political management of the economy. Nor would it exclude the politics dictated by social justice organizations, such as the Liberty Hill Foundation, which believes "inequality is engineered, not inevitable" and calls Los Angeles the "the nation's wage theft capital." According to UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, that group played a "key" role in the OurCounty project.
For the county to achieve its goals, officials will have to take a deep dive into central planning. How else will they be able to organize a community in which, according to Curbed Los Angeles, "oil derricks and refineries would disappear from the region. Gas stations would become irrelevant," and "streetscapes would be dominated by electric vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians"?
The planners themselves admit that OurCounty is a "comprehensive" endeavor on a "scale has never been tried."
Well, maybe it's never been tried if we leave out the many failed 20th century attempts to order entire nations in Eastern Europe around an "enlightened" ideology promising a prosperous and egalitarian utopia.
This is not to say the Los Angeles planners are socialists but is said merely to point out the defects, as well as the inherent coercion, in trying to use government as an organizing tool.
The attraction of central planning "seems, at first sight, so reasonable that it is hard to see why any intelligent person would oppose it," the late theologian and author David Elton Trueblood once wrote, because "every intelligent person engages in planning. A thoughtful man plans his day, his week, his year, his life work."
Yet, "planning for another involves factors which are totally absent in planning for one's self."
SOURCE
Obama Blows $15 Million on Mansion Doomed by Rising Tides He Failed to Slow
If you've ever been underwater on a car loan, you know what an uneasy feeling that can be. Barack and Michelle Obama are currently in escrow on a $15 million beachfront estate which itself may one day be completely underwater if climate research funded by his own administration is anything to go by.
How can they sleep at night?
Climate Central, backed by a Who's Who of climate alarmists (and sometimes your tax dollars), warned in 2017 that the part of Martha's Vineyard featuring the Obamas' new summer home could fall victim to rising seawaters under the group's "Extreme Scenario 2100" model. That's according to new research by the Daily Caller's Peter Hasson.
There's a fun little tool at the group's website, where you can use Google Maps to get a 3D view of what happens anywhere in the world under the Extreme Scenario. Living at 7,400 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I didn't bother to punch in my own address. I figure Monument Hill is pretty safe under any scenario except for Extreme Ice Age, which actually seems a lot worse, globally, than some coastal flooding. Curiously, Climate Central hasn't issued any dire warnings about another ice age, even though some geologists say we're overdue for one.
The Extreme Scenario tool's home page opens with a view of Manhattan fully flooded, which isn't alarmist at all, even though Climate Central admits that the scenario is, as the name suggests, extreme.
Still, $15 million for a summer home you might someday need scuba gear just to visit, does seem a bit extreme. But as "recovering investment banker" and author Carol Roth reports, the Obamas are "rolling in dough" since leaving office. That's thanks to "a joint book deal worth $65 million, high-priced speaking engagements and a deal with Netflix," Roth writes.
But it's different when the Lightbringer lives the lush life, because he worked so hard for eight years slowing the rise of the oceans and all that.
More seriously, what about the optics involved? It can't look very good, the Obamas spending eight figures on a summer home supposedly at risk of inundation. Or Al Gore's carbon footprint, which is one of the few things on Earth still larger than Al Gore. And all those celebrities and royalty flying off in private jets to tiny islands, to be whisked away from the airfield in high-performance cars, all to attend a conference on climate change. How do they think they look, emitting all that carbon and then telling us to jack up our thermostats to 82ø on summer nights?
Actually, I think they love the optics.
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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IN BRIEF
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Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here. It shows that we actually live in an era of remarkable temperature stability.
Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”
Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts
This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance
This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.
I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead
And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried
There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.
"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.
Antarctica is GAINING mass
Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.
The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.
Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.
Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was
Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith
Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion
Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"
Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion
Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it
A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"
Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker
Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.
"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen
The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans
Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days
The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"
Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers
As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.
David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."
Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.
Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below
WISDOM:
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Physicist
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
UNRELIABLE SCIENCE:
(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)
(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)
Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'
Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton
Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper
"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens
"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken
'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire
Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."
Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.
Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling
There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam
Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine
"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.
"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus
"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley
Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.
"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell
“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001
The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman
Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man
"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.
ABOUT:
This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career
Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output
Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.
Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.
And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field
And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.
A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.
A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.
SOME POINTS TO PONDER:
Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.
Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver
The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years
Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at
97% of scientists want to get another research grant
Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.
Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.
A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with
David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"
To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.
Greenie antisemitism
After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"
It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!
To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2
Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.
Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.
The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.
The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.
Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott
Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)
The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".
For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....
Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.
After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.
The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").
Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?
Jim Hansen and his twin
Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.
See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"
I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.
Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed
Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!
UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet
The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?
For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.
Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.
There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".
The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory
Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!
Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.
The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"
Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.
Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.
Cook the crook who cooks the booksThe 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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