2016 NASA DATA SHOWS THAT GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHANGE NOT CAUSING RETREAT OF POLAR ICE


Bigger graph here

Note that this is about global ice not Arctic ice.  A global theory should be supported by global data.  It isn't

Updated NASA data on the polar ice cap is showing results that are contrary to all who claim global warming is shrinking it. Reportedly, global warming (better known presently as climate change) has not caused any recession of polar ice.

According to a report by Forbes, a NASA satellite instrument revealed that the Earth’s polar ice caps have not receded at all since it began its measurements back in 1979. From what was shown in its data, total polar ice has generally remained above the post-1979 average, a finding that contradicts the most-frequently spoken claims by those who push global warming as the primary reason why the polar ice caps are receding.

Polar Ice Cap

To be fair though, the aforementioned information on the polar ice caps not receding is taken as a whole. What scientists who pushed the the global warming agenda kept concentrating on was the sea ice loss, often associated with huge chunks of the polar ice cap itself falling into the ocean. Beginning in 2005, said sea ice receded at a modest pace for several years and by 2012, it was approximately 10 percent from the 1979 measurement. This fact has many of the same scientists, who push the global warming or climate change agenda, screaming it is the reason why 10 percent of sea ice has receded. In the full scope of things, 10 percent is considered a poor number to utilize as “proof.”
Actually, an article written by Daily Mail back in 2013 reports the opposite of what all the global warming and climate change enthusiasts are pushing. According to their report, the polar ice caps were growing by 29 percent in a year, a result that has caused them to coin the term “global cooling.” As visual proof, the report provided NASA photographs of the Arctic Ocean’s polar ice cap in August of 2012 and August of 2013. By comparing the photographs, there is clearly an expansion of said ice cap from the previous year.

Sea Ice, Arctic Ocean, Polar Ice Cap

The Daily Mail provided a graphic of two NASA photographs of the Arctic Ocean’s polar ice cap in August of 2012 and August of 2013. Comparing the two pictures, it is shown said ice cap has increased.

Despite the aforementioned sources showing that the polar ice caps have generally not receded, many global warming and climate change enthusiasts are still crying wolf, pushing the agenda the polar ice caps are melting away. All anyone has to do is do a simple internet news search (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.) for “polar ice caps” and they will find numerous articles on the doom and gloom caused by global warming and climate change. What’s funny is that some of those articles even have fixed countdowns that have already passed, yet have not come true.

With that in mind, one person who should be shoving his foot in his mouth is former Vice President Al Gore. Back in 2007, while receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for campaigning global warming especially through An Inconvenient Truth, he predicted there would be no more polar ice caps by 2014. Seven years later, we had a polar ice cap that is thicker and covers 1.7 million square kilometers.

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The Link between Extreme Environmentalism and Hard-Core Racism

In my reading and writing on the history of eugenics (here, here, and here), I’ve begun to discern a common trait between the people called environmentalists and racists from a century ago.

They share a common outlook that is illiberal to its core. They imagine that a wise and powerful state can better plan a future for both nature and man. Both groups were panicked about unplanned progress, assuming it could only resort in degeneration, mongrelization, and destruction. They dreamed of a future in which they and not the unwashed masses would be in charge of how resources are used and how the human race propagates itself.

Madison Grant Saves the Trees and the White Race

Thanks to Mother Jones, my suspicions have been confirmed. An essay that pleads with the progressive movement to deal forthrightly with its own grim history of racism discusses the life and work of Madison Grant (1865-1937). This bushy-lipped aristocrat was the hero of the environmentalists in the Progressive Era. He saved the redwoods of California from logging. He was the guru behind the creation of national parks. He undertook the most aggressive efforts ever to preserve species from extinction. He was handsome, urbane, ridiculously well educated and well connected, and “the greatest conservationist who ever lived.”

Also, Grant wrote the book that Adolf Hitler described as “my Bible.” The book is the 1916 The Passing of the Great Race. A bestseller for many years, on the coffee tables in all the fashionable houses, it is quite possibly the crudest, crankiest, and most bloodthirsty racialist tract ever written; and there’s a lot of competition for that title. He championed segregation, exclusion, sterilization, immigration restrictions, a welfare state (to keep women from working), a high bar for professional employment (minimum wages), and aggressive central planning.

The Passing is a hard read actually. You will discover more than you ever want to about the inferiority of everyone but people like Grant himself. He sounded alarm bells about the coming “mongrelization” of the race, given the influx of Jews, Italians, Slavs, Africans, and every group other than the one that supposedly built civilization and made it great. Uncontrolled procreation is destined to ruin all things. Along the way, you find wicked ethnic caricatures covered by the gloss of science (the “Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality, and ruthless concentration on self interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation…”).

Racism Is an Ideology

Once you read this literature – it was almost impossible to avoid in the period between 1880 and 1935 or so – you begin to get the hang of it. The word racism – thrown around far too recklessly – exists as an accurate description of a special version of anti-liberal ideology. This isn’t about off-color jokes, prejudice, or even a preference for one’s own people. It’s a settled worldview that postulates race, far above any other concern, as the driving-force of history. It has a nightmare scenario of random race-mixing as a consequence of free-wheeling sexual association. And it has a utopia in mind: a great nation inhabited only by the purest stock. It is anti-capitalist, anti-individualist, and anti-liberal to the core, and it views government as savior.

From a scientific point of view, the racists are deeply confused. They find differences between people and posit irreconcilable conflict. If they grappled with what Carlyle called the “dismal science,” they would discover a more beautiful picture: the division of labor, the exchange economy, and free association lead people to find value and dignity in other human beings regardless of race, and to discover it is in everyone’s self interest to respect the equal freedom of others. For this reason, the historical trajectory of commercial society has always been toward integration, inclusion, equality, and liberalization. This is also why racism as an ideology ultimately turns against liberalism.

Grant’s theory of government sums it all up:

Mankind emerged from savagery and barbarism under the leadership of selected individuals whose personal prowess, capacity, or wisdom gave them the right to lead and the power to compel obedience. Such leaders have always been a minute fraction of the whole, but as long as the tradition of their predominance persisted they were able to use the brute strength of the unthinking herd as part of their own force, and were able to direct at all the blind dynamic impulse of the slaves, peasants, or lower classes. Such a despot had an enormous power at his disposal which, if he were benevolent or even intelligent, could be used, and most frequently was used, for the general uplift of the race. Even those rulers who most abused this power put down with merciless rigor the antisocial elements, such as pirates, brigands, or anarchists, which impair the progress of a community, as disease or wounds cripple an individual.

This is a restatement of the views of Thomas Carlyle, the founding father of fascism, united with pseudoscience of racial uplift, resulting in a worldview that serves as a perfect foil to the liberal tradition of Thomas Jefferson through F.A. Hayek. Is the fabric of history woven by brilliant planners with power, or by the cooperative and decentralized choices of millions of individual actors? There’s no question where people like Carlyle, Grant, and the fascist tradition stand on this question. To their minds, a unplanned social order is chaos and decline in the making, and is saved only by strong men.

Redwoods and Nordics

Thanks to the profile in Mother Jones, I had the chance to read some of Grant’s work on the environment as well, which predates his race books and continued even after. What one finds here is the same spirit at work. There is a theory of environmental history during which the fittest of the fit survive (think of the majestic trees of the Redwood Parks) while the unfit are culled. What is going wrong? The demands of commercial society are prompting stupid people to destroy this evolution. There is an apocalyptic scenario of a coming doom if government doesn’t act. But there is also a solution: total government ownership and control under the firm hand of intelligent people like himself.

It’s truly bizarre. Replace the mighty redwoods with the white race and you have an identical paradigm unfolding here. The enemy is the same (too many inferior people doing random things in their own commercial interest). The fear-mongering is the same: we are doomed if this keeps up. The solution is the same: government needs to act with ferocity.

Mother Jones is to be commended for its conclusion: “it's worth remembering because the movement has always struggled with elitist and exclusionary elements in its ranks.”

But, listen, this isn’t about the grim intellectual personalities of some of these Progressive-Era monsters. This isn’t even a personal attack or exposé. This is a problem of a worldview that is anti-liberal at its core. Whether we are talking about environmental purity or racial hygiene, the loathing of freedom itself is the issue and the factor that unites greens, browns, and reds of all stripes.

Enemies of freedom come in many flavors. The deeper you look into this history, the more the flavors blend together. We tend to think of these varieties of authoritarianism as being opposed to each other. It is more correct to think of them as the inevitable splits within the same movement.

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Analysis: Green Energy Is Growing 5 Times Slower Than Dems Demand

America isn’t even close to getting enough energy from wind and solar power to the levels Democrats say are required despite extremely lucrative subsidies, according to an analysis of 2014 data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) conducted by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

A draft of the Democratic Party’s proposed platform for this year’s election would require every state get 50 percent of its electricity from “clean sources” by 2020 and 100 percent by 2050. Though the platform never defines what constitutes a “clean” source, wind and solar energy are the only “clean” sources that can significantly expand.

Wind and solar power provided 4.4 and 0.4 of all electricity produced in America in 2014 respectively, according to the EIA. Last year, wind and solar power only accounted for 4.7 and 0.6 percent of all electricity generated in America respectively, according to data from the EIA. Hydropower and biofuels account for six and 1.6 percent of all electricity generated last year, but both are increasingly targeted by the green movement, difficult to rapidly expand and dependent upon regional conditions.

This means that the percent of wind power provided substantially more electricity, but grew at a slow rate of less than 6.4 percent, while solar produced far less electricity, but grew at a much faster rate of 50 percent. If both wind and solar power continue growing at their present rates, they will only provide 6.41 and 4.56 percent of America’s electricity by the 2020 deadline.

That’s only one-fifth of the electricity called for by the proposed Democratic platform, even if the extremely high growth rates of wind and solar continue. Even if hydropower, biofuels and geothermal,which are either growing at much slower rates or cannot be expanded, are added in, that would still only account for less than 20 percent of American electricity by 2020. Claiming that America will get 50 percent of its electricity from “clean” power by 2020 is therefore exceedingly unrealistic, even with generous subsidies.

Green energy generation is concentrated in only a handful of states, making the situation much worse. The EIA doesn’t break down wind power use by the state level, but its does for solar in 2014, and the results show that there may be no good way of encouraging solar power to grow more rapidly.

Out of the 50 US states, only Hawaii, California, Arizona and Florida got more than 1 percent of energy from solar power. Each one of these states has noticeably favorable weather environments for solar power. Only California had a notably high number of pro-solar power state policies and a majority of US states got less than 0.1 percent of their energy from solar power in 2014.

Statistical regressions run by The DCNF found no statistically significant correlation between the number of policies and the percentage of solar power obtained by the state. The DCNF mapped and displayed the data to demonstrate this clear lack of correlation.

Objectively, Hawaii gets a higher portion of its electricity from solar than any other state, getting 3.66 percent of its energy from solar. However, Hawaii only has 29 policies supporting green energy, which is far fewer than the national average of 51 policies.

Minnesota gets a mere 0.031 percent of its energy from solar, even though it has 141 pro-green energy policies, making it the second most pro-solar regulatory environment in the nation. Other states like Colorado, Oregon, Texas, New York and Washington all had at least 90 pro-green energy policies, but all get less of their electricity from solar than the national average. Alaska, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming got so little energy from solar power that the EIA found that the amount was legally indistinguishable from zero.

A 2014 study by the left-leaning Brookings Institution found wind power is twice as expensive as the conventional power it replaces and that solar is three times as expensive.

Solar power gets 326 times more in subsidies than coal, oil, and natural gas per amount of energy generated, according to 2013 Department of Energy data collected by Forbes.

Solar power by itself receives more federal subsidies than all fossil fuel sources combined, according to the EIA. Green energy in the U.S. got $13 billion in subsidies during 2013, compared to $3.4 billion in subsidies for conventional sources and $1.7 billion for nuclear, according to EIA data. Solar companies simply cannot maintain their current high levels of growth without government support, but even more support likely won’t speed up that growth enough to meet the Democrat’s goals. .

Most solar subsidies go to residential installations and include a 30 percent federal tax credit, while wind is usually industrial scale and is thus somewhat more efficient per dollar spent. Solar-leasing companies install rooftop systems, which cost a minimum of $10,000, at no upfront cost to the consumer. Companies do this because the state and federal subsidies are so massive that such behavior is actually profitable.

The DCNF previously used statistical analysis to show that the more pro-green energy policies a state has, the less likely it was to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

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The Green/Left obsession with the oil industry

Looking back on the 20th century and the first sixteen years of the 21st, future historians may find an extraordinary thread running through left-wing politics in the developed world – the systematic and never-ending assault on oil companies.

The assault has been relentless. It began with the 1911 antitrust laws in the US that were used to break up the Standard Oil Company into Esso, Sohio, Mobil, Amoco and Chevron.

It was seriously believed by some that that both world wars (and all subsequent ones), were driven by the oil companies, and not by the politicians alone.

Then in the last 30-odd years, communists and socialists of every stripe agreed that the oil industry, virtually on its own, was responsible for destroying the planet by emitting carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide

It is now rare to find commentators in the major media prepared to challenge a theory that defies history and common sense, especially as the basis is the assumption that carbon dioxide, and recently it seems carbon of any kind – even trees if you follow the weird logic of some extremists – is a poison.

Whole industries, entire governments with their associated bureaucracies, the UN, the EU, churches and universities have all embraced the idea of carbon emissions poisoning the climate and causing an impending world disaster of Armageddon proportions.

Those few who dare to challenge this orthodoxy are subject to ad hominem attacks of extraordinary viciousness.

They are pilloried, chased out of employment; their motives questioned, scorned, ridiculed, ostracised and treated as Protestants once were in 16th century Europe.

Is all this rational? Are oil companies and their products uniformly bad for human health and the world itself? Are the oil companies engaged in some vast conspiracy that works behind the scenes to suppress truth?

Such thoughts used to be the stuff that mad people spouted on street corners. Now it is in the mainstream of political life, taking on a momentum of its own.

In the US, public prosecutors (who are politicians first and professionals second it seems) have now chosen to use legal means to silence critics of global warming theory, on the grounds that it is not a theory but a fact, and to say otherwise is fraud.

The prime target of this assault on free speech is the Exxon oil company, of course. It is the largest company in the oil industry. Destroying it will be a major triumph for the climate alarmists and their socialist hangers-on.

It will be a victory for those who believe in a central all-powerful sate that controls every aspect of the life of its citizens. That this assault on essential democratic freedoms that were wrenched from the superstition and intolerance that gripped Europe before the industrial revolution, is a major shift from reason to emotion and fear.

Now no less than 16 US public prosecutors have banded together to demand that Exxon-Mobil hand over e-mails, paper memos, documents of any kind that so much as use words like “climate change”, “global warming” or “carbon dioxide emissions”, as well as all communications with those who oppose climate alarmism.

These guardians of US law and the US constitution and Bill of Rights want to hunt through decades of company documents in a massive fishing expedition to find Exxon guilty of something.

Those who follow the climate change phenomenon and its political offshoots have long been suspicious, and even alarmed, by some of its manifestations, and the steady march towards greater intolerance of dissent from its orthodoxy.

Climate change

The latest to join the Exxon hunt is the Massachusetts attorney-general Maura Healey who has broadened the chase to include 40 years of Exxon communications with a handful of conservative organisations known colloquially as “think tanks”.

Allegedly involved in the antiglobal warming doctrine is the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Beacon Hill Institute and the Acton Institute.

Curiously, neither the Beacon Hill nor the Acton Institute has ever received funds from Exxon. Never mind, they are conservative organisations, so bring them in for a grilling; they are bound to be guilty of something.

Healey isn’t the first attorney-general to target conservative groups that disagree with most Democratic politicians on global warming policy. The Virgin Islands attorney-general in March gunned for Exxon, issuing a subpoena to Exxon for its communications with dozens of conservative think tanks, policy experts and scientists.

New York’s attorney-general launched an investigation into Exxon’s global warming stance in November, based on reporting by liberal journalists at Inside Climate News and Columbia University, that Exxon had been covering up climate science for decades while funding right-wing activist groups.

He led a conference in March, which announced that more prosecutors would probe Exxon and fight against Republican attacks on federal environmental regulations.

Former vice-president Al Gore attended the event, as did a group of environmental activists. He even suggested that global warming sceptics should be jailed, claiming that freedom of speech did not mean the right to commit fraud. It was a veiled attack on scientific inquiry.

Exxon has responded by filing a complaint against the New York attorney-general, supported by two Republican attorneys-general. It has also filed against the Massachusetts attorney-general, claiming she has attacked Exxon as a calculated political stunt, alleging that she announced the results of her investigation before she served her subpoena to the company.

It will be a great legal fight that Exxon has the resources to bear. It is ironic that a private company should now bear the banner of individual liberty to prove that it is not the enemy of democracy but by force majeure, its defender.

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Global Warming Insurance Requires Reasonable Premiums

Global warming advocates are increasingly claiming carbon dioxide restrictions are a prudent and conservative insurance policy against severe global warming. Insurance policies, however, are only prudent and conservative when the price of the premiums is reasonable considering the likelihood and severity of the risk. Global warming insurance policies based on affordable natural gas, nuclear, and hydro power might make reasonable investments, but insurance policies based on unreliable and prohibitively expensive wind and solar power do not. If global warming advocates hope to forge a broad consensus for American policymakers to purchase insurance, they need to stop jacking up the premiums through expensive wind and solar power.

A mountain of scientific evidence, with some noteworthy examples found here, here, here, and here, strongly indicates (1) we are unlikely to experience rapid warming in the foreseeable future and (2) the consequences of any future warming are likely to be only modestly harmful, at worst. Many scientists, including highly credentialed scientists and policy experts at the CO2 Coalition, make a strong argument that the net impacts of our moderately warming planet are beneficial rather than harmful. Even so, the unlikely but plausible possibility that very harmful future warming will occur might justify reasonably priced global warming insurance.

Energy is the lifeblood of our economy. The price of energy directly impacts how much money people have left over for food, clothing, housing, health care, education, and consumer goods after paying electricity and fuel bills. The price of energy also factors into every good and service that is purchased and traded in our economy. When energy prices go up, it is like a tax increase – with the exception that people theoretically get something of value in return when they pay higher taxes to government. When energy prices go down, it is like a tax cut giving people more money to spread throughout the economy and improve the quality of their lives.

Carbon dioxide reductions can come in many forms. Some of the most prominent environmental activists insist on wind and solar power to achieve those reductions. However, nuclear and hydro power are also zero-emissions power sources. Nuclear and hydro power are much more dependable than variable wind and solar power, making them even more effective and reliable at reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Also, natural gas cuts carbon dioxide emissions in half versus coal power.

These multiple options to reduce carbon dioxide emissions give us multiple means of purchasing global warming insurance. When purchasing life, home, health, or auto insurance, a prudent investor engages in comparison shopping to avoid overpaying. Policymakers considering purchasing global warming insurance must do the same thing.

Wind and solar power clearly impose expensive insurance premiums. A study by the left-of-center Brookings Institution found replacing conventional power with wind power increases electricity prices by 50 percent. The same study found replacing conventional power with solar power triples electricity prices. Even these price premiums don’t tell the full story, as the variable nature of wind and solar power poses additional costs and strains on electrical generation and distribution.

Fortunately for people seeking carbon dioxide reductions, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro power offer more affordable alternatives. Natural gas and hydro power are cost-competitive with coal. Nuclear power is somewhat more expensive, but still more affordable and reliable than wind and solar. Conservatives are wary of taking too much money out of consumers’ household budgets as “insurance” against unlikely global warming harms, but conservatives may well sign on to global warming insurance that entails adding more affordable energy sources to our power mix.

This leaves global warming advocates with a choice: continue insisting on expensive wind and solar power that lack public support and will slowly get implemented if at all, or immediately assure substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by supporting natural gas, nuclear, and hydro power.

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Greenie versus Greenie in Australia

Sadly, the realistic ones were defeated by the sentimentalists.  With few dingoes and no Aborigines to hunt them, kangaroo numbers have grown into pest proportions, which  endangers other, smaller animals.  But that is too cerebral for the sentimentalists

Bush Heritage Australia has forfeited the inheritance of a 350-acre property near Bega and lost numerous donors as they face backlash from a planned kangaroo cull at Scottsdale​ Reserve, south of Canberra.

Regular supporters of the non-profit organisation have pulled donations following reports of a cull, with one referring to the organisation as "hopeless frauds".

Bush Heritage aims to "conserve biodiversity" at properties either purchased or donated across Australia.

However, the Australian Society for Kangaroos unveiled a practice of culling which has left supporters feeling lied to.

"I've cancelled my donation forever," one email read, in correspondence with ASK.

"If so-called saviours of the bush can't do it without this slaughter they shouldn't be doing it. Hopeless frauds."

Another person emailed ASK to say they would no longer be leaving their "precious" property to Bush Heritage in their Will.

"Following what seems to be a constant stream of horror stories [including] secretive native animal culling, we have now changed our Wills by omitting any reference to Bush Heritage," the email reads.

Bill Taylor, of Bywong, said he was a contributor to the non-profit for a number of years, before "pulling the plug" when the organisation didn't respond to questions about kangaroo culling he raised in reference to their annual report.

In response to the protests, Bush Heritage Australia has cancelled the kangaroo cull, which was approved by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage.

Science and research manager at Bush Heritage Australia, Jim Radford, said kangaroo culls had been undertaken at the Scottsdale Reserve in the past, however the planned cull was called off due to, in part, concerns for public safety.

He said one the main concerns was "unauthorised access onto the site". "We didn't have any direct evidence of that and we weren't approached directly but we considered there was a risk," he said.

He said Bush Heritage had a range of ways to manage the kangaroo population, but as a last resort they turned to culling the macropods. "Under certain circumstances we do need to reduce the pressure applied by an excessive number of kangaroos," he said.

The Scottsdale Reserve is home to a variety of flora and fauna classed as vulnerable or critically endangered, including the Rosenberg's monitor and Yellow-box grassy woodland.

Mr Radford said the kangaroo population in the grasslands at Scottsdale Reserve was at more than twice the recommended level for maintaining ecologically sustainable populations.

"I think there is a great misunderstanding out there," Dr Radford said. "In some landscapes there are hugely elevated and unsustainable numbers of roos.

"We aim to maintain a healthy, resilient kangaroo population but there comes a point where their a risk to their own welfare from starvation stress. But to be honest our primary concern is the other species that are potentially impacted."

He said there would not be a kangaroo cull undertaken in the "foreseeable future" at Scottsdale Reserve

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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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