Some Warmist hate mail

Steven Craig Jones wants to save the planet.  He has a site that says so here: pulsar774.tripod.com

So how does he deal with skeptics?  He sent Marc Morano the following message:

"you are dead wrong on climate change.  it is the number one international security issue on planet earth in 2016. you climate deniers need to be put in prison"

He's all charm, isn't he?  He makes no attempt to dispute any point ever made by any skeptic and makes no attempt to present any fact. Since he believes in anti-gravity that is perhaps just as well.  All he can resort to is Stalinism:  Imprison your opponents. A dismal soul, indeed. He is completely dogmatic, with a completely closed mind.  It might not be good to see him coming towards you on a dark night if you disagree with him.

The fantasy of being able to save the planet must generate such a warm glow inside.  No wonder he hates any threat to that.  How awful to find that you are in fact completely irrelevant and that your crusade has been a complete waste of time!  The poor dupe.

His email is calisunnerz@gmail.com

UPDATE:  A reader has a message for Mr. Jones:

Mr. Jones

Your religion has no God unless you think that the Egyptian god Ra is your deity. Your Hell is a temperature that will not go up, a sea level that only changes with the tides, a storm that never develops, ice that will not melt, a prediction that never comes true and sinners that will not join your cause to be saved.

You know that unless there is a sudden upward shift in temperatures, that massive storms become a way of life, that poles become consistently ice free,  polar bears become extinct,  Greenland turns green again, models become predictors of real events...........your religion has no choice but to conduct a mid evil  inquisition and crucify the non believers.  You also have to know that all of the signs are now pointing to a coming cooing period and that there will be no legislation for at least another 8 years or so that will bail you out. Your religion is doomed. Your deity never existed. Your name will be erased from the books and your history will only be recorded in joke books. You can be thankful that there is no Hell for your false prophecies.

Check out the new religion................Another Little Ice Age..........that only an increase in CO2 can save us from.  We must burn more coal, shut down nuclear, wind, solar and green construction. We must reincarnate the extinct polar bear and penguins from the DNA bank.  Ban DDT, Round Up, Honey Bees and stop farmers from growing efficient CO2 hungry plants.  We need to run the air conditioners even in winter and leave the windows open to waste heat. Back to big cars and gas guzzlers. Out with electric lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners that don't suck.  Wash dishes with hot water again and enjoy a luxury bath for your wife and take one yourself as well.

Insure your place in Heaven by giving a warm coat to a non believer.

Try not to think about having present day sinners locked up for when they are freed they may exercise the same bad judgement against you. A cold jail cell may be even more painful than a hot one.

Apologies Are Not Necessary For Fossil Fuels

Why does the fossil fuel industry have such a bad reputation?

Whatever its flaws, it is the very engine of our civilization, producing a staggering 87% of the world's energy. This industry and this industry alone enables billions to grow their food, heat and cool their homes, and power their factories.

And yet it's politically correct to hate it. And a big part of the reason is the industry itself — not for what it does, but for what it says (and doesn't say).

Instead of educating the public about the value of its product and the unmatched efficiency with which it produces it, fossil fuel companies often apologize for being fossil fuel companies and publicly aspire to be solar and wind companies.

Consider Shell. In 2012, it was one of the major targets of a Rolling Stone essay by activist Bill McKibben.

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McKibben excoriated the fossil fuel industry and called for broad-based divestment of fossil fuel stock — singling out Shell as a prime target.

"The more carefully you do the math," he wrote, "the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell."

Surely this was the occasion for Shell — and the rest of the industry — to mount a vigorous defense. After all, the facts were on their side.

The use of fossil fuels correlates positively with every indicator of human well-being from life expectancy to individual income to nourishment to access to clean water to safety from climate. Billions of people are more prosperous now than they were 30 years ago, thanks to fossil fuel.

Shell did not marshal any of these arguments. In fact, there seems to be no record of the company responding to McKibben at all.

What did it do instead? It tried to position itself as a nonoil company.

Shell's website declares that its goal is "bringing man-made emissions down to zero."

In its campaign about the future of energy, it focuses not on advanced oil technology that is actually leading us to the future, but on "renewable" experiments, like "footstep power."

Shell ceded the moral high ground in an even more public way two years later. The firm invited McKibben to keynote a climate conference it sponsored, the Chatham House Conference on Climate Change.

If Shell thought this would win goodwill, McKibben made it immediately clear that it miscalculated:

"I didn't know Shell was sponsoring this conference when I agreed to do it, but I'm glad for the chance to say in public that Shell is among the most irresponsible companies on earth.

"When they write the history of our time, the fact that Shell executives watched the Arctic melt and then led the rush to go drill for oil in that thawing north will provide the iconic example of the shortsighted greed that marks the richest people on our planet."

We can imagine the surprise on Shell executives' faces when they heard this. What we can't understand is why they would have been surprised at all.

Public opinion about an industry is determined by how we think of a company's core product. If we think what it makes is great, we will have a generally high opinion of the firm; if we think what it makes is bad, we will have a generally low opinion of it.

No other industry engages in this kind of self-loathing behavior.

And in the absence of a compelling public narrative in its favor, the industry's opponents have managed to shape the story about energy companies to great effect.

They've likened oil and coal to tobacco and heroin — addictive, destructive substances that ruin the things they touch. As long as there is no counternarrative, as long as these companies let themselves be made into public enemies, this kind of talk will continue.

The fossil fuel industry needs to stand up for itself. The companies need to defend their record, champion their successes and be honest about their shortcomings. They need to promote the fact that they have helped billions out of poverty and generated the energy that powers the planet.

Until they do, the industry's foes will continue to fill the vacuum — and the industry will have only itself to blame.

SOURCE  





How the Exxon Case Unraveled

It becomes clear that investigators simply don’t know what a climate model is

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s investigation of Exxon Mobil for climate sins has collapsed due to its own willful dishonesty. The posse of state AGs he pretended to assemble never really materialized. Now his few allies are melting away: Massachusetts has suspended its investigation. California apparently never opened one.

The U.S. Virgin Islands has withdrawn its sweeping, widely criticized subpoena of research groups and think tanks. In an email exposed by a private lawsuit, one staffer of the Iowa AG’s office tells another that Mr. Schneiderman himself was “the wild card.”

His initial claim, flounced to the world by outside campaigners under the hashtag “exxonknew,” fell apart under scrutiny. This was the idea that, through its own research in the 1970s, Exxon knew one thing about climate science but told the public something else.

In an Aug. 19 interview with the New York Times, Mr. Schneiderman now admits this approach has come a cropper. He reveals that he’s no longer focusing on what Exxon knew/said but instead on how it goes about valuing its current oil reserves. In essence, Mr. Schneiderman here is hiding his retreat behind a recent passing fad in the blogosphere for discussing the likelihood that such reserves will become “stranded assets” under some imaginary future climate regime.

His crusade was always paradoxical. The oil industry reliably ranks last in Gallup’s annual survey of public credibility. The $16 million that Exxon spent between 1998 and 2005 to support organizations that criticized speculative climate models is a minuscule fraction of the propaganda budgets of the U.S. Energy Department, NASA, NOAA, EPA, not to mention the United Nations’ climate panel, etc. etc.

The episode ends happily, though, if Mr. Schneiderman’s hoped-for political career now goes into eclipse. But we haven’t finished unless we also mention the press’s role.

The “Exxon knew” claim, recall, began with investigative reports by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, both suffering from the characteristic flaw of American journalism—diligently ascertaining and confirming the facts, then shoving them into an off-the-shelf narrative they don’t support.

We have since learned that both the L.A. Times (via a collaboration with the Columbia School of Journalism) and InsideClimate News efforts were partly underwritten by a Rockefeller family charity while Rockefeller and other nonprofit groups were simultaneously stoking Mr. Schneiderman’s investigation.

When caught with your hand in the cookie jar in this way, there’s only one thing to do, and last week the Columbia School of Journalism did it, awarding a prize to InsideClimate News.

For this columnist, however, the deeper mystery was cleared up last year when I appeared on the NPR show “To the Point” to discuss the subject “Did Exxon Cover Up Climate Change?” (Google those phrases) with ICN’s “energy and climate” reporter Neela Banerjee.

Ms. Banerjee has been collecting plaudits all year for her work. The work itself involved revisiting Exxon’s climate modeling efforts of the 1970s. Yet, at 16:28, see how thoroughly she bollixes up what a climate model is. She apparently believes the uncertainty in such models stems from uncertainty about how much CO2 in the future will be released.

“The uncertainties that people talk about . . . are predicated on the policy choices we make,” namely the “inputs” of future CO2.

No, they aren’t. The whole purpose of a climate model is to estimate warming from a given input of CO2. In its most recent report, issued in 2013, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes a doubling of atmospheric CO2 and predicts warming of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius—i.e., an uncertainty of output, not input.

What’s more, this represents an increase in uncertainty over its 2007 report (when the range was 2.0 to 4.5 degrees). In fact, the IPCC’s new estimate is now identical to Exxon’s 1977 estimate and the 1979 estimate of the U.S. National Research Council.

In other words, on the crucial question, the help we’re getting from climate models has not improved in 40 years and has been going backward of late.

For bonus insight, ask yourself why we still rely on computer simulations at all, rather than empirical study of climate—even though we’ve been burning fossil fuels for 200 years and recording temperatures even longer.

OK, many climate reporters have accepted a role as enforcers of orthodoxy, not questioners of it. But this colossal error not only falsifies the work of the IPCC over the past 28 years, it falsifies the entire climate modeling enterprise of the past half-century.

But it also explains the non sequitur at the heart of the InsideClimate News and L.A. Times exposés as well as Mr. Schneiderman’s unraveling investigation. There simply never was any self-evident contradiction between Exxon’s private and public statements. In emphasizing the uncertainty inherent in climate models, Exxon was telling a truth whose only remarkable feature is that it continues to elude so many climate reporters.

SOURCE  





Experts “surprised” to discover what skeptics have known for years: world has been warming for 200 years

For years, skeptical scientists have been pointing at data that showed the the world started warming somewhere from 1700 – 1820. This has been known from glaciers, sea level studies, ice cores, boreholes, ocean heat content estimates, and more proxies than any climate-nerd cares to name.

Finally, expert climate modelers are “surprised” to discover this:

“…their study had detected warming in the Arctic and tropical oceans from around the 1830s, just 80 years after the Industrial Revolution started in England. “It was an extraordinary finding,” she said. “It was one of those moments where science really surprised us. But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.”

How many grant dollars did it take to figure out what skeptical scientists have been saying for years?

The correlation with global temperatures and actual numerical human emissions is abysmal, so now Abrams et al ignore the numbers and appear to suggest that “The Industrial Revolution” itself started the warming — as if the mere invention of the steam engine heated the world.

[Dr Abram] said the study attributed the gradual warming to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions linked to the move from an agricultural to industrialised society.  “The climate system did respond quite quickly to industrialisation …. it was a small response, but it’s a measurable one.”

Global warming started 200 years ago, but human emissions of CO2 were bugger-all-of-nothing until after World War II. Humans have put out nearly 90% of all our CO2 molecules ever since the War started. We’ve put out 30% of all our emissions ever since the year 2000. The message hammered home over and over, is that temperatures don’t correlate at all well with our CO2 emissions and never have.

Planes, cars and coal power plants make no difference to global warming

The warming isn’t any different when human CO2 emissions are small or massive. The rate of warming was the same in the 1920s when nearly half of all horsepower still came from horses. Indeed without any electricity at all, and no cars, humans “caused” warming which was as fast as a decade when a billion people flew in the sky.

More HERE  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)




Colorado’s Anti-Fracking Crackup

If a pair of extreme green ballot measures fall in the Rocky Mountains and no one in the liberal media is paying attention, does the collapse make a sound?

This week, two anti-fracking initiatives backed by deep-pocketed environmental lobbying heavyweights, such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, failed to gather enough signatures. The more draconian of the efforts, Initiative 78, would have imposed a mandatory 2,500-foot setback around all oil and gas operations — essentially halting drilling in upward of 95 percent of Colorado’s energy-rich land area.

These drastic attempts to sabotage the oil and gas industry didn’t just miss by inches. They missed by a mile high and wide.

Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams announced that supporters of the two measures surpassed the required signature threshold but not by enough to compensate for the number of signatures that were rejected during a random sampling. One of the initiatives garnered 77,000 signatures out of about 98,000 needed to qualify for the ballot; the other, 79,000. Every other state initiative campaign (on issues ranging from primary election reform to cigarette taxes to assisted suicide) this year hit the mark.

Worse for eco-activists, the secretary of state reported that the petition for the de facto fracking moratorium included “several potentially forged signature lines” and has been referred to the state attorney general for investigation. At least one hired signature gatherer told KUSA-TV that homeless men in Denver filled out forms with “bulls—.”

Election fraud? What election fraud? Yep, that election fraud.

Despite massive funding from such dark money donors as billionaire hedge fund manager turned climate change warrior Tom Steyer, the big green propaganda machine keeps coming up short. The enviros failed to gather enough signatures for a similar measure two years ago. Skittish Democrats, including Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, have distanced themselves from the eco-radicals, as the energy sector generates thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to the state economy.

One thing the anti-frackers have been successful at: manufacturing self-serving excuses for their failures. They complained that their allies didn’t spend enough on them. They carped that their opponents spent too much on opposing them. They whined that the secretary of state’s office was “biased” against them for throwing out invalid signatures.

And they pouted when their phony attempt to con reporters into believing that their measures would get on the ballot blew up in their faces three weeks ago. A day after volunteers paraded into the secretary of state’s office with dozens of boxes of signatures, an official noted that a large number of the boxes were half-full — or half-empty.

Hypocritical save-the-planet soldiers who bemoan our dependence on foreign oil are hellbent on strangling the fracking revolution, which has doubled domestic U.S. oil output and helped drive gas prices down.

Here’s what the job-killing fractivists just won’t admit: Coloradans like their thriving energy sector, and they want to keep it.

Is Hillary Clinton paying attention? She has vowed to her lefty voter base that despite reaping big bucks from fossil fuel campaign finance bundlers, she will ensure that there are not “many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.” It’s as clear a threat as President Barack Obama’s campaign vow to make electricity rates “skyrocket.”

Let’s hope that as the anti-fracking crackup goes in the Rockies, so goes the nation.

SOURCE  





EPA’s Dishonest Bookkeeping Misleads the American People

Have you ever heard of a school where students are given credit on a math test for an A on a history test? If that sounds preposterous to you, you may be surprised to hear that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses this logic when proposing new regulations. In the process of calculating the benefits of proposed regulation, the EPA also counts benefits from other regulations, essentially double counting benefits that are created elsewhere. With this slight-of-hand, EPA gives the false impression that the benefits of new regulations outweigh the costs. The bureaucrats at EPA then use this as propaganda to force through even more of their destructive regulation.

Longstanding executive orders and regulatory agency guidance require EPA to subject each proposed major rule to a cost-benefit analysis. This makes sense, given that EPA regulations are supposed to be about making Americans better off overall, not just expanding government power. For example the Clean Air Act states that its purpose is “to promote the public health and welfare and the productive capacity of [the U.S] population.” If a regulation is a net cost to public health, welfare or productive capacity, the EPA is not authorized to pursue it. As our air and water have become increasingly cleaner, it has become harder and harder for EPA to justify ever more burdensome regulations. Instead of accepting the idea of diminishing returns, and understanding that tighter regulations are not needed, EPA has sought ways to manipulate the cost-benefit analysis.

The favorite mechanism for this manipulation is double counting so-called co-benefits. Co-benefits are derived from a separate regulation than the one being subjected to cost-benefit analysis. The most common co-benefits are from reducing particulate matter and ozone, two harmful air pollutants. These two pollutants are specifically regulated by the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), which prescribes aggressive standards to reduce these pollutants. The game EPA plays is that it claims the reductions mandated by NAAQS as benefits for its other regulatory proposals. This is most notorious in the case of carbon dioxide regulations.

When seeking to justify the enormous costs of regulating carbon dioxide, EPA faced a problem: it is virtually impossible to document benefits from reducing carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, is not harmful to human health (indeed humans produce carbon dioxide), and is hugely beneficial to plant life. To get around this, the EPA decided to include co-benefits, since sources that produce particulate matter and ozone (such as power plants) are often also large producers of carbon dioxide. Ultimately as much as 94% of the domestic benefits claimed by the EPA for the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s flagship carbon dioxide regulations, actually come from reducing emissions of particulate matter and ozone, not carbon dioxide. And again, those are reductions which are already mandated by other regulations, leaving the actual claimed benefits of the Clean Power Plan at a minor level.

This co-benefits game is played by the EPA with numerous other regulations. In every case, this ploy serves to inflate the alleged benefits of regulation, helping the EPA ram through ever more stifling regulation while claiming a net benefit to the American people. This kind of dishonest bookkeeping would get the average citizen arrested, but for the regulators it is standard operating procedure.

The lesson is this: regulators will seek to regulate by any means necessary. Left to their own devices, federal regulators will always seek to expand their reach. The only answer to this kind of dishonesty is affirmatively reducing the regulatory power of the federal government, leaving as little room as possible for the mischievous, destructive games of the bureaucrats.

SOURCE  

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