NOTE:  I am going into hospital later today for a rather complex procedure -- so I may not be blogging for a couple of days -- JR



I don’t need air conditioning, and neither do you

What the writer below says is perfectly correct.  I have lived almost all my life in the tropics and subtropics but it is only recently that I have got AC.  And to this day it is relatively unusual for Australian homes to have AC.

But it is not for others to tell us what we need. That is a personal decision.  In my case, my advancing years made me less able to cope happily with temperature extremes so I had an inverter installed in my bedroom/study.

Leftists always think that they can dictate what people need but that is just their usual Fascistic arrogance.  In the case below the subtext is is that we should not use AC because it consumes electricity, which in turn causes global warming.  The fact that there has been no anthropogenic global warming for nearly 20 years is not considered.

The reality is that we live in an age of unprecedented abundance in all sorts of ways and the Greenies for their own misanthropic reasons have been trying to stop that.

Below is a picture of Bill McKibben, a prominent Warmist.  To me he looks batshit crazy, a man obsessed.  Would you want him telling you what you need?




It’s time to come out of the closet. Or, more precisely, the sweat lodge.

My family lives without air con­ditioning, except for one antique, ­semi-comatose window unit that “cools” the bedroom to approximately the same temperature as Dallas at dusk.

Our house in Philadelphia was built in the 1920s, when people were tough and resourceful. For most of the year, the house is cool and pleasant, as long as there isn’t a mash-up of continuously scorching days and epic humidity, when the air is putrid, stagnant and, if it were a color, would definitely be mustard.

Which would be this summer. Which, so far, is the fourth-hottest summer on record in the Washington area. Emphasis on so far. NASA reports that July was the Earth’s hottest in recorded history. Cheer up, people say to those of us without air conditioning, September’s coming. Except people forget that most of September is still summer.

There are people among you, friends even, who live without artificial cooling during what are affectionately known as the dog days of summer. One-third of American households don’t have air conditioning, according to the Energy Department. Many of those, of course, can’t afford it, but people don’t like AC for a variety of reasons beyond cost: environmental, aesthetic, nostalgic, social and cultural.

And, yes, to humble-brag, which I may be doing right now, about our greater tolerance, lower carbon footprint and puny electric bills, which are half the temperature outside.

Clinical social worker Olivia Snyder lives on the fifth floor of a Philadelphia apartment building with southern exposure and no air conditioning. It gets so hot, she says, “I don’t want to turn on the burners, let alone the oven.”

But window units offend her. “Air conditioners are ugly. I really like the view,” she says. Also, “I hate sleeping with the noise. I’m super-weird about noise.”

There are people who are living without air conditioning in places far hotter than the East Coast. In 2009, Chris George, now a Washington Post digital editor, voluntarily gave up air conditioning for a year while living in the inhumane heat of Tempe, Ariz., mostly out of environmental concern. “I’ve been called many variations of the word ‘insane,’ ” George wrote in the Arizona Republic of the experiment, during which temperatures reached 103 degrees inside his home. But he also learned that “comfort is really just what you’re used to.”

There are a thousand reasons my family does without central air. Actually, several thousand.

Installing central air would be a profoundly expensive enterprise, involving a cavalcade of zeros and most likely new, less-beautiful windows. When our children ask why we’re still sweating it analog-style, and our house feels like a Tennessee Williams stage set but without the fetching undergarments and crippling dysfunction, we answer, “College tuition, vacations, cheese. You know, things like that.”

Also, I don’t like the hermetic feel of central air, the way it reduces everything to an artificial hum and makes you feel isolated from the environment, your body’s natural responses and, depending on your age, all the summers of your youth.

Air conditioning is not sultry or mysterious. It has no place in pulp fiction or film noir. The movie “Body Heat” is set in a small Florida town in 1981 yet is completely devoid of central air, which manages to make absolutely everything seem sexy — ice cubes, sweat, even wind chimes, which are generally just annoying.

There are positive aspects of going without. Fewer house guests. More dinner invitations. That humble-bragging business. Showers. I can’t tell you how rewarding showers feel. And ice cream tastes way better.

SOURCE







EPA lies by omission

Below is a screed about huricanes that the EPA puts out for students.  Most of it is fair enough but, as with all Green/Left writing, what is left out is the key to seeing how you are being misled.  It may be true that hurricanes have become more powerful in some recent period. What is not mentioned, however, is that hurricanes have become much RARER  -- which is actually in line with the absence of any recent global warming.  Taken as a whole, the hurricane data suggest temperature STASIS, not global warming

Hurricane in suburban neighborhood Hurricanes and other tropical storms get their energy from warm ocean water. As the top layer of the ocean gets warmer, hurricanes and other tropical storms grow stronger, with faster winds and heavier rain. Because of higher temperatures and increased evaporation, climate change causes other types of storms to get stronger, too.

What's happening now?

This graph shows two lines. One is an index that measures the strength of hurricanes, and the other shows the temperature of the ocean surface. The two lines show a similar pattern.

Hurricanes in the northern half of the Atlantic Ocean have become stronger over the last few decades. This graph shows the Power Dissipation Index, which measures total hurricane power each year based on the number of hurricanes and their wind speed. The graph also shows how hurricane strength is related to water temperature.

Over the past 20 years, hurricanes and other tropical storms in the Atlantic Ocean have become stronger. Since the 1980s, the United States has also experienced more intense single-day storms that are dumping a lot more rain or snow than usual.

What will happen in the future?

As the climate gets warmer, heavier rainstorms and snowstorms (with more precipitation than normal) are expected to happen more often, and hurricanes around the world could keep getting stronger.

Why does it matter?

Hurricanes and other storms can cause flooding; damage buildings, roads, and other structures; harm crops; and put people's lives in danger.

SOURCE





If you don't believe in global warming, you're too 'mentally ill' to be allowed to buy a gun?

In recent days, President Obama announced new "executive actions" on guns, that included language to shore up current federal law aimed at keeping mentally ill Americans from buying guns. Some skeptics of the president's actions believe that, as is usually the case, there are ulterior motives behind his actions.

For example, some believe that the president's order may include guidance on declaring people who disagree with Obama's policies – like those regarding so-called "global warming" and "climate change" – as mentally unstable.

It's not too far out of the realm of possibility, given this president's narcissism, anti-gun demeanor and ideological, cult-like adherence to the concept of man-caused climate phenomena.

As noted by the Media Research Center, anyone designated as "mentally ill" by doctors – who now have been empowered to report patients they deem to be unfit to the FBI – can be denied the right to keep and bear arms.

The official White House fact sheet on Obama's new regulations states:

"Current law prohibits individuals from buying a gun if, because of a mental health issue, they are either a danger to themselves or others or are unable to manage their own affairs. The Social Security Administration (SSA) has indicated that it will begin the rulemaking process to ensure that appropriate information in its records is reported to NICS."

'Climate denial' is a 'mental disorder'

Obama has repeatedly claimed that the threat of climate change is a greater one than that of terrorism; so, aren't people who deny that climate change is real, a danger to themselves or others and, thus, unfit to own firearms?

The notion that climate skeptics are not mentally capable people is not a new concept employed by the radical Left. Consider:

-- Oregon-based "sociology and environmental studies" Prof. Kari Norgaard has publicly stated that skepticism of climate change is a mental problem that must be "treated." (To show what a fruit loop this woman is, she also compared acceptance of the reality that climate change is bogus, to the "struggle" against racism and slavery.)

-- The journal Psychology Today published an article that listed a trio of warning signs that you are living a life of "climate change denial:"

* You think climate change is bad, but not that bad.
* You don't have an emotional reaction to climate change.
* You aren't getting political.

So, if you're one of those people who have come to understand that the climate change agenda is really about control, not "saving the planet," or you're not mad enough about it, or you've opted out of the political fight over it, you're mental.

-- As noted by The Telegraph's Christopher Booker (one of those mentally ill deniers), in a piece entitled, Climate 'denial' is now a mental disorder, says so-called "eco-psychologists" convened recently at the University of the West of England in Bristol, to examine the notion of classifying climate change denial as a "mental disorder."

-- And who could forget that Obama's EPA chief, Gina McCarthy, said that deniers are not "normal" people?

Believe it – or else

Those crazy Leftists – they create their own narrative and then, when the majority of people catch onto them, they change the rules of the game back into their favor.

Can't convince people to believe in the man-caused global warming hoax on their own? Fine – we'll just label them crazy, and for extra measure, we'll see to it that they are denied their constitutional rights in the process.

Speaking of bat-stuffing crazy regarding this issue, how about Robert Kennedy, Jr., calling for a law that punishes people who don't buy the warming globaloney? That's no different than a dictator requiring his people to believe in his edicts, no matter how obviously flawed they are, or risk losing their freedom (or lives).

It's not clear that Obama's order will affect global warming – let's call them realists – but you can certainly see where this "you're crazy if you don't believe it" attitude could go.

SOURCE  





More idiocy from John Vidal and Peter Wadhams

Warmist predicted 4 of the last 0 ice-free summers

John Vidal is probably the stupidest journalist reporting on climate change for the Guardian, which is quite an achievement given the stiff competition. It was Vidal, you may recall, who claimed that the sexual harassment allegations against Pachauri were part of a conspiracy cooked up by climate sceptics.

Today, Vidal says that it is Time to listen to the ice scientists about the Arctic death spiral. Who are the scientists Vidal says we should listen to? Well, it turns out there’s only one quoted (distinguishing between singular and plural doesn’t seem to be one of John’s areas of expertise), and guess what, it’s Peter Wadhams again.

Wadhams is of course notorious for his failed predictions of Arctic ice disappearance.

In the Telegraph in 2011 Wadhams declared that “It is really showing the fall-off in ice volume is so fast that it is going to bring us to zero very quickly. 2015 is a very serious prediction and I think I am pretty much persuaded that that’s when it will happen.” This was unchallenged by the journalist, showing that unquestioning promotion of climate hype crosses the political spectrum in the media.

The BBC told us that Arctic summers would be ice-free by 2013, quoting both Wadhams and Maslowski.

But most remarkable is this article by John Vidal himself, Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within four years, published in 2012.  I wonder whether John Vidal’s science skills extend as far as adding 2012 and four. If so, this might help him understand why he’s not taken seriously.

But Vidal isn’t just a gullible idiot, he’s misleading readers with falsehoods. In his article today he claims that “Wadhams says what other scientists will not”, implying that other climate scientists agree with him but don’t want to speak out. Nothing could be further from the truth. Other climate scientists have publicly ridiculed Wadhams for his extreme views, with comments such as “ridiculous projections with no basis in physics”,  “Entertaining break with Wadhams. Back to science now” and “Hasn’t Wadhams already predicted 4 of the last 0 ice-free summers?”  Yet Vidal describes Wadhams as an “experienced and rational scientist”.

SOURCE  





Rising sea levels caused by global warming could be GOOD news for coral reefs

It all depends on your modelling

Global warming could do at least as much to protect the world’s coral reefs as it will to damage them, new research from Australia suggests.

Climate change has long been believed to be disastrous for the fragile marine environments, but fresh modelling has predicted that oceanic changes caused by the phenomenon will also work to the reefs’ advantage.

Rising sea levels, caused by melting polar ice caps, could help moderate the extreme and often damaging conditions found in many reef habitats, according to scientists at the University of Western Australia.

By studying reef systems off the coast of north-western Australia, they showed how rapid sea level rise could substantially reduce the volatile daily extremes of water temperatures in the shallow reef habitats over the next century.

The resulting changes, they say, may potentially ameliorate the other effects of global ocean warming.

Mounting levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are predicted to cause substantial changes to ocean temperature over the next 100 years, increasing the frequency and severity of mass bleaching, where corals expel the symbiotic algae living in their tissues, turning them completely white.

In April scientists announced that 93 per cent of the famous 1,500 mile Great Barrier Reef, on Australia’s East Coast, had now been bleached as a result of an underwater heatwave caused by global warming.

The situation caused some scientists to urge the Australian government to decide which parts of the reef it wanted to save.

Reefs in the Caribbean and in other regions such as the Maldives have also been badly affected by bleaching.

Warming seas are part of a “triple punch” said to be hitting coral reefs as a result of global warming, along with ocean acidification, which makes it more difficult for corals to build and maintain their skeletons, and more frequent and powerful reef-wrecking storms.

The new research by Professor Ryan Lowe and his team is the first to attempt to predict in detail the positive effects rising surface levels on reef environments.

Temperatures within shallow reefs often differ substantially from the surrounding ocean, so predicting future patterns of bleaching and other stresses is difficult.

However, recent science has focused on trying to improve predictions of regional ocean warming patterns driven by long-term climate change, as well as by the intensification of short-term climate patterns such as El Nino.

Using a collection of detailed field measurements, Prof Lowe and his team developed a modelling framework for predicting how local temperature extremes in shallow reefs will change in the future as a result of rising sea levels.

They found that even a modest sea level rise could substantially reduce local reef water temperatures in the future, meaning the change may partially contribute to limiting reef heat extremes in an overall warming ocean.

Despite the international carbon emissions caps agreed at the Paris climate talks last year, atmospheric warming is still expected to rise to between 2.7 and 3C above pre-industrial levels, breaching the 2C threshold beyond which many scientists say heatwaves and significant sea level rises are inevitable.

In 2015 the United Nations World Heritage Committee agreed not to list the Great Barrier Reef as an “in danger” site, providing Australia reports back to the committee in December this year with an adequate account of what is being done to preserve the reef.

SOURCE




Beyond The Spin: Alaska Village’s Demise Is More Complicated Than Yelling ‘Global Warming’

The Alaskan village of Shishmaref has voted to relocate because global warming puts its residents at risk of being washed away — or at least that’s the simplified narrative environmentalists and the media peddle.

Shishmaref, a small town of nearly 600 people just north of the Bering Strait, has become a poster child for global warming. It’s threatened by erosion and storm surge due to shrinking Arctic sea ice, and on Tuesday, its residents voted to relocate — they just don’t know where they’re going or how they’ll pay for it.

Shishmaref’s story, however, is much more complicated than news headlines suggest. A look back at the settlement’s history shows life there has always been precarious and always been at the mercy of nature.

“Within the next two decades, the whole island will erode away completely,” Esau Sinnok, a Shishmaref native and environmentalist, wrote to the U.S. Interior Department in 2015.

“To put this in perspective: I was born in 1997, and since then, Shishmaref has lost about 100 feet,” he wrote in his highly publicized essay. “In the past 15 years, we had to move 13 houses – including my dear grandma Edna’s house – from one end of the island to the other because of this loss of land.”

Sinnok’s essay is emblematic of how many understand the situation for Native American coastal villages across Alaska. The spectre of global warming is seen from Shishmaref to Newtok to Kivalina, and even the Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana.

Read the news and you’ll hear the story of a people being forced out of their homes by erosion after 400 years. But that’s not the whole truth.

Take Shishmaref. People have been there for about 400 years, but only on a seasonal basis. Native Alaskans would traverse the the region looking for the best places to find food, and for part of the year, Sarichef Island had what people needed.

Oregon State University anthropologist Elizabeth Marino is one of the few scholars to really dig into Shishmaref’s history and why the settlement is located where it is today. Marino notes how Shishmaref didn’t become a permanent settlement until the 20th century after the “U.S. government pursued a deliberate policy of ending all nomadic lifestyles among Native Americans,” according to a review of her book by Alaska Dispatch News (ADN).

“The people of Shishmaref weren’t forcibly collectivized in the way that Natives were elsewhere in the country in the 19th century, but the government’s opening of a school in Shishmaref, coupled with the onset of compulsory education, had the same effect,” ADN wrote of Marino’s book.

In fact, Shishmaref isn’t even a native Alaskan name. The settlement is named after a Russian explorer who traversed the Alaskan coast in 1821.

At first, settling on Shishmaref made sense, but it was “always tenuous ground to build on,” ADN reported. Natives cobbled together homes on Sarichef Island out of whatever they could, so their kids could go to school.

But they built on permafrost, and that’s a risky bet without modern techniques and equipment to keep the sensitive frost from melting. Human settlement and rising temperatures melted the permafrost Shishmaref’s homes were built on, meaning basically sand was exposed and was washed away by storm surge. Combine that with shrinking Arctic sea ice levels, and you’ve got a big problem.

“They didn’t think about infrastructure or any of that because there was no such thing,” Dan Kish, the senior vice president for policy of the free market Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“It wasn’t until the government came along and started handing out checks and delivering things that you needed to settle down so you could get it,” said Kish, who spent years traveling Alaska while working for the House committee overseeing U.S. natural resources.

But don’t think it’s just recent temperature rise that’s harmed Shismaref. Storm surge and erosion has been a problem for decades before scientists and activist began worrying about global warming.

Shishmaref is part of a chain of barrier islands — sand islands that are formed by storm surges and separated from the mainland by shallow bays. The Shishmaref barrier islands likely formed about 1,700 years ago, during a period of increased storminess, according to a 1999 study.

Storminess subsided after that until about 1,200 years ago, when they began to get fiercer again. The study suggests the Bering Strait region sea level has risen nearly five feet over the last 5,000 years.

“They built in a bad place,” said Kish. Even Marino noted Shishmaref residents had discussed relocating to mainland Alaska as early as the 1970s. Sea levels and erosion have been impacting the island for thousands of years.

An Uncertain Future

The U.S. government basically forced Shishmaref into existence and now the village is trying to get the feds to pay for their removal.

Shishmaref is at a breaking point. The town voted Tuesday to relocate, but the Army Corps of Engineers estimated in 2004 the removal could cost $180 million — that’s $320,000 per resident.

Federal officials have already given the town $27 million between 2005 and 2009 to stem erosion. Those measures only bought the town 15 years, according to The New York Times.

Some aren’t convinced the relocation will happen — two previous efforts to relocate were defeated over worries about leaving the town’s school behind. Opponents of moving don’t like the potential relocation sites on the mainland because they lack barge access.

It’s also unclear how they’ll pay for it all. Shishmaref is poor and would need millions from taxpayers.

Supporters of moving are somewhat optimistic since the Obama administration natives on the Isla de Jean Charles $48 million in January to relocate.

“I’m going to have to wait to see how all of this shakes down,” a Shishmaref resident told NYT over the phone. “There’s a number of questions to be answered before we can make a very serious attempt at moving.”

SOURCE  

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