The Nazis were Greenie elitists too

The Nazi and Greenie ideals of a romanticized rural past and a "controlled" population are of course identical. And so is the elitism. Most active Greenies are well-off people. Gore's wealth is legendary and even a humble NASA scientist like James Hansen, pulled in $1.2 million last year. Greenie protesters in England tend to be graduates or students from private schools.

So the further parallel that the European elite in the Nazi era was heavily pro-Nazi should be no surprise. It all fits: The Nazis were socialists/Leftists and so are the Greens. Environmentalism is not the same as Nazism but it is also aggressive and is working towards the selfsame goal. While there is environmentalism, Nazism will not be dead. Excerpt from a book review below:

An important feature environmentalism shares with fascism is the centrality, within each movement, of the European aristocracy. However, while aristocrats flaunt their environmental credentials, they conceal their past involvement with fascism. This is why Jonathon Petropoulos’ Royals and the Reich (Oxford, 2006) is so useful. Highlights:

270 German princes and princesses were Nazi Party members. A sampling of 312 “old aristocratic” families found 3,592 Party members. Every noble family east of the Elbe River had at least one member in the Party. A third of Nazi-aristocrats joined the Party before Hitler became Chancellor; a majority supported the Nazis, or like groups, before this date. Nobles were the most fascistic of any demographically identifiable cohort.

Royal Hohenzollern princes were high-profile Nazi campaigners during the Nazis’ struggle for power. Aristocrats occupied thousands of top government posts during the Third Reich.

King Edward VIII was a Nazi. He was definitely guilty of treason and possibly guilty of attempted regicide. Edward did not abdicate in order to marry Wallis Simpson. He was forced from the throne by PM Baldwin because Edward was heading up a Nazi fifth column in the UK.

George V, George VI, the Duke of Kent and scores of British aristocrats promoted “appeasement.” This “peace movement” was an effort to steer Britain into the Axis.

Western Europe’s aristocracy, including most German princes, survived World War II. They retained, even supplemented, their land holdings. Over the past few decades they have engineered a remarkable renaissance.

Topping the list of individuals and institutions Petropoulos thanks for helping him write Royals and the Reich are: the House of Hesse, Queen Elizabeth II, and the Duke of Edinburgh. He also acknowledges support from: John and Kingsley Croul, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Cambridge University and Oxford University Press.

More HERE





Did you know that Syria is located beside the North Atlantic?

When presented with massive evidence of a Medieval Warm Period that was at least as warm as today, the limp response of the Warmists is to say that it was just a "local" North Atlantic event. Never mind that New Zealand, China and Argentina must by that logic be North Atlantic countries. Now Syria (at the far end of the Mediterranean) has been added to the list of countries where the MWP has been found -- and it was warmer than today there too:

Reference

Kaniewski, D., Van Campo, E., Paulissen, E., Weiss, H., Bakker, J., Rossignol, I. and Van Lerberghe, K. 2011. "The medieval climate anomaly and the little Ice Age in coastal Syria inferred from pollen-derived palaeoclimatic patterns". Global and Planetary Change 78: 178-187.

Description

Based on analyses of pollen found in a 315-cm-long sediment core retrieved from alluvial deposits within the floodplain of the River Rumailiah located at 35°22'13.16"N, 35°56'11.36"E in the coastal Syrian lowland, Kaniewski et al. were able to identify key plant functional types that allowed them to construct pollen-derived Biomes (PdBs) similar to those employed by Tarasov et al. (Journal of Quaternary Science 13: 335-344), after which they were able to relate "the ratio of PdB warm steppe (WAST) divided by PdB cool steppe (COST) to local temperature, as also was done by Tarasov et al. The end result of this endeavor was their identification of the timeframe of the MWP (AD 1000-1230) and their finding that at approximately AD 1130, the MWP exhibited "warmer temperatures compared to AD 2000," yielding MWP > CWP.



SOURCE





UN Envoy Urges Everyone To Be As Ignorant As She Is

U.N. special envoy on climate change Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland and her 22-person international commission started warning countries to avert global warming in 1987. Twenty-five years later, the former Norwegian prime minister said the ongoing lack of international cooperation to curb carbon emissions and invest in clean energy threatens us all.

Already, drought, hunger and disease connected to rising temperatures jeopardize “our common future,” she told a large audience at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Hunger and disease have declined dramatically. The average life expectancy used to be less than 30 years, and people typically live into their 70s now. As far as drought goes, there is no evidence that drought has increased. Why is a supposedly respectable university entertaining such foolishness?



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"Renewables" can produce too much power as well as too little

When the sun is shining and the winds are blowing the solar panels and windmills can put out so much power that conventional generators have to be taken offline, leading to big revenue losses for their owners. So fewer if any conventional generators will be built -- leading to blackouts when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing

The 15 mile-per-hour winds that buffeted northern Germany on July 24 caused the nation’s 21,600 windmills to generate so much power that utilities such as EON AG and RWE AG (RWE) had to pay consumers to take it off the grid.

Rather than an anomaly, the event marked the 31st hour this year when power companies lost money on their electricity in the intraday market because of a torrent of supply from wind and solar parks. The phenomenon was unheard of five years ago.

With Europe’s wind and solar farms set to triple by 2020, utilities investing in new coal and gas-fired power stations no longer face stable returns. As more renewables come on line, a gas plant owned by RWE or EON that may cost $1 billion to build will be stopped more often from running at full capacity. It may only pay for itself on days like Jan. 31, when clouds and still weather pushed an hour of power on the same-day market above 162 ($220) euros a megawatt-hour after dusk, in peak demand time.

“You’re looking at a future where on a sunny day in Germany, you’ll have negative prices,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance chief solar analyst Jenny Chase said about power rates in wholesale trading. “And a lot of the other markets are heading the same way.”

Europe’s biggest power markets give preference to renewable energy including forcing some utilities to use their fossil-fuel plants less. That cuts into profit, complicating investment decisions as the companies try to meet emission targets and replace older plants and networks that Citigroup Inc. estimates will cost them more than 900 billion euros by 2020.
Profit Margins

Northern Europe’s renewable-energy goals call for about 200 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity by 2020, or almost a third of the current installed base, compared with about 70 gigawatts today, according to the Finnish energy consultant Poyry. Even by 2014, gross profit from burning coal in Germany may skid by as much as 41 percent, according to Barclays Plc.

The gross margin at a coal power plant after deducting fuel and emission permit costs, the so-called clean dark spread, may “collapse” to as low at 3.50 euros a megawatt-hour, Barclays analysts including Peter Bisztyga said in a Sept. 1 report. The spread was at 6.15 euros today, Bloomberg data show.

Narrower margins mean it will take longer for companies to pay off building new gas- and coal-fired facilities. Those plants are needed. They can run around the clock, preventing blackouts when the sun sets or the wind dies as European power demand grows 5 percent through 2015 compared with 2010, according to Paris-based bank Societe Generale SA’s forecast.

Based on weather patterns over the past 10 years, there’s a 72-hour period each year when a wind farm would produce less than 5 percent of its potential output, Hare said. “Some other plant has to be there, but the company has to make the return on its investment in just those 72 hours over 10 years.”

Power prices on the Epex Spot SE exchange in Paris that handles German and French supply vary hour-by-hour depending on how available capacity is. At times they can become negative when renewable energy peaks and there’s a surplus of power.

Grid operators in Germany, Europe’s biggest power market, are also required to take renewable output if it is available, just as in Spain and France.

U.K. energy regulator Ofgem is considering paying generators to keep plants open as back-up suppliers, compensating them for down time. The so-called capacity payments, which also are being studied in Germany, are likely to favor gas over coal, as gas plants can be turned on and off faster, according to Phillips.

More HERE




More Greenie racism: Reminiscent of "Jewish physics" in Nazi Germany

Are climate alarmists following in the footsteps of 1905 Nobel laureate and chief Nazi physicist Philipp Lenard?

Readers will remember that in July climate alarmists tried to advance the notion that conservative, white guys are to blame for climate skepticism.

“Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States” was first published online, and now it’s in print — so it must be true and the trade publication Climatewire gave the whacky paper another run this morning:

When it comes to climate change denial, not all human beings are created equal. As a recent study shows, conservative white males are less likely to believe in climate change.

“It’s not surprising,” said Aaron McCright, sociology professor at Michigan State University, who is a white male himself. But anecdotal evidence is not scientific, he said. “You really don’t know what’s going on until you crunch the numbers and find out.”

Besides the trend amongst skeptics, the study also found that conservative white men who self-report a high understanding of global warming — dubbed “confident” conservative males — are even more likely to express climate change denial.

McCright’s study, “Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States,” was published online in July and printed in the October 2011 issue of Global Environmental Change, which ranks first out of 77 journals on environmental studies.

When researchers ‘crunch the numbers’ for climate change denial, people like him keep showing up.

The study has created somewhat of a buzz, said Riley Dunlap, co-author and professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University. The paper was well received in academic circles, but he admitted he was concerned about a backlash from the conservative movement. While there have not been any major outcries, the study appears to have raised a few temperatures in Chicago.

Here’s the Chicago blowback:

“This paper is a transparent effort to take the focus off the actual scientific debate and instead engage in race bating, class bating and other sociological devices to win a science argument,” said James Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the Chicago-based Heartland Institute.

Back to Philipp Lenard. As explained at Wikipedia:

Lenard is remembered today as a strong German nationalist who despised English physics, which he considered as having stolen their ideas from Germany. He joined the National Socialist Party before it became politically necessary or popular to do so. During the Nazi regime, he was the outspoken proponent of the idea that Germany should rely on “Deutsche Physik” and ignore what he considered the fallacious and deliberately misleading ideas of “Jewish physics”, by which he meant chiefly the theories of Albert Einstein, including “the Jewish fraud” of relativity. An advisor to Adolf Hitler, Lenard became Chief of Aryan physics under the Nazis.

That there’s been no significant warming over the past 15 years despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 levels, is not racism — it’s a fact.

That climate models fail to predict global climate change is not conservative political dogma — it’s a fact.

And “conservative-white-guy-climatology” is an attempt to disparage those facts.

SOURCE






Warmist says that skeptics know the science best and believers rarely think rationally

From a Warmist site, discussing a Warmist scientist

Why, given increasingly dire warnings from scientists and increasingly strong arguments for action, is the world (particularly the U.S.) doing so little to address climate change? And how can that be changed?

You'll be shocked to hear that Socolow, who spends his life in a world of ideas and explanations, concludes that the answer is better ideas and explanations. Do the ideas and explanations of climate hawks need to be more compelling, more urgent, more emotionally resonant? Oh no. Climate hawks need to dial down the emotional resonance and add more hedges and nuances to their explanations. Specifically, they need to more prominently acknowledge that: 1) climate change is unpleasant, unwelcome news, 2) climate science is unfinished and many of its projections are uncertain, and 3) many of the proposed solutions to climate change carry risks of their own.

What motivates Socolow's prescription becomes a little clearer in one of his subsequent responses:

Politicians follow publics, and the publics are dismayed. So, I think in terms of reaching the public. I think the climate change activists, myself included, have lost the American middle, and I’m trying to say that this loss can be explained and maybe even undone. Thinking in terms of an unwelcome message, a partially understood problem where very bad outcomes cannot be ruled out, and universally flawed solutions seems to me a grown-up way of engaging the electorate.

....People do not determine their opinions on political issues (and climate is a political issue) based on rational assessments of facts. They tend to adopt the views of their peer groups and use motivated reasoning to find support for those pre-existing positions. For the most part, those who strongly support climate action do not do so because they've been rationally persuaded; in fact, they tend to be quite ignorant of the scientific details. People who reject climate science tend to know the most about it, because they're motivated to learn about it in order to reject it.

More HERE





A REAL hockeystick graph

Everyone who follows the climate change controversy even casually will know about the “hockey stick” controversy. Well, Nature magazine this week offers a new graph of interest: the rising trend of retractions of scientific research papers (see blow). Lo and behold, it looks like a hockey stick! (Heh.)



The Nature story notes:

[B]ehind at least half of them lies some shocking tale of scientific misconduct — plagiarism, altered images or faked data — and the other half are admissions of embarrassing mistakes. But retraction notices are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade.

There’s a lot more here to ponder, such as the essentially hollow and meaningless nature of modern peer review, and the increasingly tribal and ideological drift of much of the academic scientific establishment. Some other time perhaps I’ll get further into these matters.

Elsewhere in this week’s issue of Nature, Dan Sarewitz of Arizona State University, one of the truly honest brokers in the academic science and policy world, offers a terrific essay on what’s wrong with so-called “consensus” science reports. (Dan is a pal, but hat tip to RH for bringing Dan’s piece to my attention.) The article may be behind a subscriber firewall, so here’s a relevant excerpt:

When scientists wish to speak with one voice, they typically do so in a most unscientific way: the consensus report. The idea is to condense the knowledge of many experts into a single point of view that can settle disputes and aid policy-making. But the process of achieving such a consensus often acts against these goals, and can undermine the very authority it seeks to project. . .

The very idea that science best expresses its authority through consensus statements is at odds with a vibrant scientific enterprise. Consensus is for textbooks; real science depends for its progress on continual challenges to the current state of always-imperfect knowledge. Science would provide better value to politics if it articulated the broadest set of plausible interpretations, options and perspectives, imagined by the best experts, rather than forcing convergence to an allegedly unified voice.

Yet, as anyone who has served on a consensus committee knows, much of what is most interesting about a subject gets left out of the final report.

SOURCE

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