Climate skepticism is racist



The hysterical Naomi Klein says so. Too silly to be worth fisking.  A mountain of argument built entirely on false premises.  Some background on the brainless braying bimbo here.  Her dream is to become a revolutionary leader ("Fuehrer" in German) and her rhetoric matches that

The annual United Nations climate summit is wrapping up in in Lima, Peru, and on its penultimate day, something historic happened. No, not the empty promises from powerful governments to finally get serious about climate action—starting in 2020 or 2030 or any time other than right now. The historic event was the decision of the climate-justice movement to symbolically join the increasingly global #BlackLivesMatter uprising, staging a “die-in” outside the convention center much like the ones that have brought shopping malls and busy intersections to a standstill, from the US to the UK.

“For us it is either death or climate justice,” said Gerry Arances, national coordinator for the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice.

What does #BlackLivesMatter, and the unshakable moral principle that it represents, have to do with climate change? Everything. Because we can be quite sure that if wealthy white Americans had been the ones left without food and water for days in a giant sports stadium after Hurricane Katrina, even George W. Bush would have gotten serious about climate change. Similarly, if Australia were at risk of disappearing, and not large parts of Bangladesh, Prime Minister Tony Abbott would be a lot less likely to publicly celebrate the burning of coal as “good for humanity,” as he did on the occasion of the opening of a vast new coal mine. And if my own city of Toronto were being battered, year after year, by historic typhoons demanding mass evacuations, and not Tacloban in the Philippines, we can also be sure that Canada would not have made building tar sands pipelines the centerpiece of its foreign policy.

The reality of an economic order built on white supremacy is the whispered subtext of our entire response to the climate crisis, and it badly needs to be dragged into the light. I recently had occasion to meet a leading Belgian meteorologist who makes a point of speaking about climate change in her weather reports. But, she told me, her viewers remain unmoved. “People here think that with global warming, the weather in Brussels will be more like Bordeaux—and they are happy about that.” On one level, that’s understandable, particularly as temperatures drop in northern countries. But global warming won’t just make Brussels more like Bordeaux, it will make Haiti more like Hades. And it’s not possible to be cheerful about the former without, at the very least, being actively indifferent to the latter.

The grossly unequal distribution of climate impacts is not some little-understood consequence of the failure to control carbon emissions. It is the result of a series of policy decisions the governments of wealthy countries have made—and continue to make—with full knowledge of the facts and in the face of strenuous objections.

I vividly remember the moment when the racism barely under the surface of international climate talks burst onto the world stage. It was exactly five years ago this week, on the second day of the now-infamous United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen. Up until that point, the conference had been a stultifying affair, with the fates of nations discussed in the bloodless jargon of climate “adaptation and mitigation.” All of that changed when a document was leaked showing that governments were on the verge of setting a target that would cap the global temperature rise at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, more than double the amount of warming experienced so far). This was defined as a strategy for averting “dangerous” levels of warming.

But the temperature target—pushed by wealthy nations in Europe and North America—would likely not be enough to save some low-lying small island states from annihilation. And in Africa, where drought linked to climate change was at that time menacing many lives in the eastern part of the continent, the target would translate into a full-scale humanitarian disaster. Clearly the definition of “dangerous” climate change had more than a little to do with the wildly unequal ways in which human lives are counted.

But African delegates weren’t standing for it. When the text was leaked, the dull UN bureaucracy suddenly fell away and the sterile hallways of the conference centre came alive with shouts of, “We Will Not Die Quietly” and “2 Degrees is Suicide.” The paltry sums rich countries had pledged for climate financing were angrily dismissed as “not enough to buy us coffins.” Black lives matter, these delegates were saying—even if this corrupted forum was behaving as if that was far from the case.

The highly racialized discounting of certain lives does not just play out between countries but also, unfailingly, within them—perhaps most dramatically within the United States. I was reminded of this while reading about Akai Gurley, the unarmed 28-year-old black man who was “accidentally” shot and killed last month in the dark stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project. Like the dilapidated elevator, the lighting system in the building had been left unrepaired, despite complaints. And when that neglect of a public institution that disproportionately serves African-Americans intersected with armed fear of black men, the result was lethal.

More twaddle HERE





Hotter days in US mean less cold cash

BY SETH BORENSTEIN

The main data behind this assertion is that the American South is poorer than the North.  Attributing that to the warmer Southern climate is brainless.  Has anybody ever heard of history and the attack on the South both during and after the uncivil war?  There are many reasons why the South today might be poorer than the North.  Attributing it to climate is pure dogmatism

Hotter days mean less cold cash for Americans, according to a new study matching 40 years of temperatures to economics.

Days that averaged about 77 degrees ended up reducing people's income by about $5 a day when compared with days that were about 20 degrees cooler. A county's average economic productivity decreases by nearly 1 percent for every degree Fahrenheit that the average daily temperature is above 59, says a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper released Monday.

And, the study's authors predict, if the world continues on its current path of greenhouse gas emissions, even warmer temperatures later this century will squeeze the U.S. economy by tens of billions of dollars each year.

This is not from storms, drought or other weather disasters - just the sweat of daily heat.

The paper by a pair of economists at the University of Illinois and University of California, Berkeley, has not yet been peer-reviewed but is part of work done for the nonpartisan economics research center that is widely cited for determining when the country is in and out of recessions. In comments from other researchers, the new study was criticized for its methods and conclusions by some economists and policy experts but praised by others as groundbreaking.

The study tries to find common ground between the hard physical science of meteorology and the softer science of economics. In doing so, the researchers used new complex statistical techniques crunching more than 76,000 data points, including daily temperatures and yearly economic data in counties across America, said co-author Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley.

The numbers were clear, the researchers said.

"Hot temperatures are very bad for the economy," said study co-author Tatyana Deryugina, a professor of finance at the University of Illinois.

This has been seen in other studies in hotter, less developed areas such as India. But scientists and economists often assumed it wouldn't be the case for richer countries with air conditioning, like the United States, said Hsiang, who teaches public policy. But America's economy doesn't adapt as experts thought, said Hsiang, who examined all U.S. counties' daily temperature and yearly economic data going back to 1970.

Hsiang said the "sweet spot" where productivity is maximized - a daily average temperature between 54 and 59 degrees - at first seemed cooler than expected, but that's an average 24-hour temperature. Daily highs can be 11 degrees warmer and lows 11 degrees cooler. So these are days when the afternoon is around 70.

While most people work indoors in climate-controlled settings they still go outside a lot, and hot weather elevates body temperature for a while, affecting how people work, Hsiang said.

"These are little things that add up," Hsiang said. "It's not like a hurricane. ... This is more like a story of deaths by a thousand cuts."

Carnegie Institute scientist Chris Field, who heads a United Nations climate change science panel that looks at the effects of global warming, praised the study as "creative and powerful."

"It may take some time for the community to reflect on the methods to decide if they are as effective as they seem, but my first impression is that this study provides unique insights into the big-picture consequences of temperature variation for income," Field said.

University of Sussex economist Richard Tol criticized the study, saying that people tend to work harder and make up productivity losses in following days. He said not taking this into account makes the authors overestimate the heat effects.

But if the losses were made up within days, the way the economic data is annualized, the study authors wouldn't have noticed any difference because they would have equaled out, Hsiang said. Further, he said, more analysis showed that there was a "make up" effect but it was in the year after a hot year and only accounted for half the losses.

Doug Handler, chief North American economist of IHS Economics, said it is hard enough to measure economic productivity accurately on annual basis, let alone come up with precise daily numbers that correlate to temperatures. He said, "the margin of error in the published statistics is too great to allow for a believable micro-assessment of this type."

John Sterman, a management professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and John Reilly, an energy economist who heads MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, both said the paper's analysis made sense to them. Reilly said other economists will want to test and evaluate the data themselves.

The study uses 44 climate computer simulations to project temperatures near the end of the century rising by about 9 degrees on average. That, it says, will reduce the nation's economic growth by 0.12 percentage points a year. Reilly said that may sound small, but it is trillions of dollars over a century.

SOURCE





97 Articles Refuting The "97% Consensus"

The 97% "consensus" study, Cook et al. (2013) has been thoroughly refuted in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, by major news media, public policy organizations and think tanks, highly credentialed scientists and extensively in the climate blogosphere. The shoddy methodology of Cook's study has been shown to be so fatally flawed that well known climate scientists have publicly spoken out against it,

    "The '97% consensus' article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it."

    - Mike Hulme, Ph.D. Professor of Climate Change, University of East Anglia (UEA)

The following is a list of 97 articles that refute Cook's (poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed) 97% "consensus" study. The fact that anyone continues to bring up such soundly debunked nonsense like Cook's study is an embarrassment to science.

[ Journal Coverage ]

Energy Policy - Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the literature: A re-analysis (October 2014)
Energy Policy - Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the literature: Rejoinder (October 2014)
Science & Education - Climate Consensus and 'Misinformation': A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change (August 2013)

[ Media Coverage ]

American Thinker - Climate Consensus Con Game (February 17, 2014)
Breitbart - Obama's '97 Percent' Climate Consensus: Debunked, Demolished, Staked through the heart (September 8, 2014)
Canada Free Press - Sorry, global warmists: The '97 percent consensus' is complete fiction (May 27, 2014)
Financial Post - Meaningless consensus on climate change (September 19, 2013)
Financial Post - The 97%: No you don't have a climate consensus (September 25, 2013)
Forbes - Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims (May 30, 2013)
Fox News - Balance is not bias -- Fox News critics mislead public on climate change (October 16, 2013)
Herald Sun - That 97 per cent claim: four problems with Cook and Obama (May 22, 2013)
Power Line - Breaking: The "97 Percent Climate Consensus" Canard (May 18, 2014)
Spiked - Global warming: the 97% fallacy (May 28, 2014)
The Daily Caller - Where Did '97 Percent' Global Warming Consensus Figure Come From? (May 16, 2014)
The Daily Telegraph - 97 per cent of climate activists in the pay of Big Oil shock! (July 23, 2013)
The Guardian - The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up (June 6, 2014)
The New American - Global Warming "Consensus": Cooking the Books (May 21, 2013)
The New American - Cooking Climate Consensus Data: "97% of Scientists Affirm AGW" Debunked (June 5, 2013)
The New American - Climategate 3.0: Blogger Threatened for Exposing 97% "Consensus" Fraud (May 20, 2014)
The Patriot Post - The 97% Consensus -- A Lie of Epic Proportions (May 17, 2013)
The Patriot Post - Debunking the '97% Consensus' & Why Global Cooling May Loom (August 7, 2014)
The Press-Enterprise - Don't be swayed by climate change ‘consensus' (September 10, 2013)
The Tampa Tribune - About that '97 percent': It ain’t necessarily so (May 19, 2014)
The Wall Street Journal - The Myth of the Climate Change '97%' (May 26, 2014)
Troy Media - Bandwagon psychology root of 97 per cent climate change "consensus" (February 18, 2014)
WND - Black Jesus' Climate Consensus Fantasy (June 25, 2013)

Much more HERE  (See the original for links)




Sierra Club’s most deceptive videos ever made on Fracking

The Sierra Club was founded in the hope that preserving the natural environment could coexist with the responsible development of the natural resources our society relies on everyday. However, despite the intentions of the groups founders, the Sierra Club has turned into an environmental activist group that is less concerned with conservation efforts than they are with promoting their agenda. This fact is made readily apparent by the recent video “Fracking 101″ released by the organization, which by many accounts is one of the most deceptive videos ever made on the topic.

Heartland Institute Research Fellow Isaac Orr and Jessica Sena debunk the claims made by this video in a 30 minute podcast. Among the inaccurate claims debunked are: the world is running out of fossil fuels, fracking is more dangerous than traditional oil and natural gas production, hydraulic fracturing creates more greenhouse gasses than other forms of energy, fracking will contaminate our water, and that the world could be powered on 100 percent renewable energy.

SOURCE





Community Defenders Drop MET Mast to stop windmill building

The MET masts used by developers to gauge wind speeds are the vanguard for every wind farm disaster: no MET mast data, no wind farm. As soon as they go up, the locals circle their wagons, marshal their forces and declare war on the developer. No surprises there.

With the wind industry on the ropes in Australia, developers are quietly pulling down their MET masts at places like Robertstown in South Australia – much to the delight of locals (see our post here).

Wherever MET masts get the chop, the locals breathe a sigh of relief as it signals the developer’s defeat and a victory for a community under threat.

But there are a growing number of cases where locals haven’t been prepared to wait for the developer to remove their masts on the grounds of defeat.

In a “we’ll never surrender” move, farmers from Maine have joined efforts elsewhere to hit wind power outfits where it hurts – grabbing their weapons of choice (a selection of spanners) in order to help a local MET mast rest safely on the ground.

Here’s a story from Bangor, Maine of a community taking its future out of the hands of a bent planning system that decided to change the rules in favour of a lying, cheating wind farm developer – AFTER a court scotched the development.

CLIFTON, Maine — Paul Fuller of Bangor and his business partner Mike Smith went to Pisgah Mountain on Sunday to cut down Christmas trees to decorate their homes for the holidays and discovered a meteorological tower on the hilltop Fuller owns had collapsed.

“The nuts and bolts from one [support] cable had been removed on one side and dropped it,” Fuller said Monday, after filing a report with Maine State Police Trooper Tucker Bonnevie.

“It’s a $30,000 piece of equipment that is destroyed,” said Fuller, who believes the slender 196-foot tall metal structure was downed as an act of vandalism.

Bonnevie said Tuesday that the tower had fallen, but “there’s no evidence at this time that any crime was committed.”

“We don’t know for sure that it’s vandalism,” Bonnevie said. “We don’t know if [the bolts] just gave way or somebody actually loosened them.”

Just one of around a dozen wires securing the tower came down, the trooper said.

Fuller and his wife in 2009 purchased 270 acres on Pisgah Mountain, which is located just south of Rebel Hill Road, and shortly thereafter approached the Clifton Planning Board about placing the meteorological tower on the hilltop to collect data about wind currents.

Fuller said the tower’s data demonstrated that there is plenty of wind to operate a wind farm, and in 2010 he submitted a five-turbine plan with the town.

The $25 million wind farm project was originally permitted in Oct. 2011, but local farmers Peter and Julie Beckford appealed the project’s permit and in December 2013 a Superior Court judge said the land use code was not followed.

The Pisgah Mountain developers filed an appeal in January to the state’s highest court to overturn the judge’s decision.

SOURCE





International Emissions Idiocy

By Alan Caruba

Most of the people of the world have concluded that the decades of warnings about “global warming” and its successor, “climate change”, is just idiotic nonsense. Few believe that humans ever had or ever will have any role in what the weather will be tomorrow or a thousand years from now. They are right.

One of the most distinguishing factors about the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory has been the way its advocates have always predicted major changes decades into the future. When the future arrived, as it has since the first doomsday predictions were made in the late 1980s, they simply push off the next arrival date for another couple of decades. A classic example is the prediction that that Arctic and Antarctic sea ice would have all melted by now. Instead the global cold weather have been making new records of late.

Delegates from two hundred nations attended the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties and the 10th session of the Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol which took place from December 1 through 12. COP 20/CMP 10 was hosted by the Government of Peru in Lima. The event is part of the United Nations agenda that began with the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.

The Kyoto Protocol dates back to 1997 and sets limits on how much “greenhouse gas” emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), nations could permit. The theory, now long since debunked, that CO2 was rising and would cause the Earth to warm too much was right in only one respect. There is more CO2, but the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for some 19 years at this point. The U.S. did not ratify, i.e. sign onto the Protocol. The Senate unanimously rejected it. Canada later withdrew from it. China and India were both exempted from it!

So what we have been witnessing have been a bunch of international officials wrangling over something that did not happen and will not happen.

The hard core “Warmists” wanted the climate change agreement to be legally binding under international law. They were led by those from the European Union. They and others wanted more money to be spent on renewable energy, wind and solar, and money given to poor countries to help them deal with climate change.

The COP20 conference was not about the climate. It was about funding wind and solar energy projects that have proven globally to be huge, expensive failures, and about providing money to poor countries that, as often as not, are poor because they are poorly governed. It’s a scheme based on totally false “science.”

As to the “science” proclaiming a warming Earth and that “greenhouse gas emissions” are responsible, the easiest and most entertaining way to learn the real science is to read Anthony Bright-Paul’s new book, “Climate for the Layman.”

Bright applies the known knowledge of the universe in which we live with the kind of logic you are not likely to hear from the likes of Al Gore or Bill Nye the “science guy.”  Add to them the blissfully ignorant legions of “leaders” of various nations who have signed off on “global warming” without a lick of knowledge with which to refute the lies and you get idiotic conferences and demands to end the beneficial use of fossil fuels which improved our lives long before and since the IPCC was created.

“So how does one measure the temperature of something that has a multiplicity of temperatures and is constantly on the move?” asks Bright. “It is clearly impossible.”  How difficult is that to understand?

“In my dictionary,” says Bright, “’Global’ is defined as ‘worldwide’. So let us ask ourselves the question—has there been a worldwide warming of 0.07 degrees Celsius? Has there been a uniform increase in temperatures worldwide? The answer is simple. It is utterly impossible to make such declaration”, adding that “It is completely impossible to measure the temperature of the atmosphere which is 100 kilometers high and which has a huge range of temperatures in a continuous state of flux.”

If it cannot be measured then years from now the climate cannot be predicted. The weather—what is happening where you live—can only be predicted in general terms for the next few days and that is largely thanks to modern satellites. Moreover, the weather is never exactly the same from day to day. Meteorologists focus on what’s happening now, but climatologists measure the climate in units of decades, the smallest of which is thirty years. The largest take in millions of years.

Carbon dioxide is such a minor “trace” gas—0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere--that most people are astonished to learn that it is Nitrogen and Oxygen that make up 99% of the atmosphere. Both are transparent to incoming and outgoing radiation. It is the Earth that acts as a conductor of heat, affected as always by solar radiation. It is the Sun along with the actions of the oceans and volcanic activity that determines the weather and, long term, the climate.

Virtually everything you have heard or been told about “greenhouse gas emissions” is pure bunkum.

The Earth is not a greenhouse closed in by heat trapping gases. It is the mass of the Earth that absorbs the Sun’s radiation and reflects it into the atmosphere. The process is so dynamic that there is no way to accurately predict what the temperature anywhere on any day.

The IPCC and its idiotic “climate change” conference wants you to believe it can predict the climate of the entire world! And control it.

Not a single dime of U.S. taxpayer’s money should be devoted to either the U.N. or any bogus “global warming” claims. We could begin by defunding the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations to limit “greenhouse gas emissions”, the reason they give for closing coal-fired plants to produce electricity.

We should laugh Secretary of State John Kerry off the stage every time in claims that climate change is the greatest threat to life on Earth.

SOURCE

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