Fact-Checking Bill Nye

Let’s fact-check Bill Nye regarding comments he made about something near and dear to my heart — wine — during the Feb. 26 edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Here’s his response to what the earth would look like today if man was not the culprit for all the warming:

“It would have looked like it did in 1750. Britain would not be very well-suited to growing grapes as it is today. French wine-makers would not be buying land to the north as they are now. People who plan to run ski resorts would still be able to do it in Europe.”

First of all, grapes are being grown in modern day Britain, but they were also being grown back when the Romans were in charge. There were 50-100 vineyards in Britain between 1000 and 1300 AD and even one in Scotland! And Britons were still giving it a go as late as the 1700s before the Little Ice Age. The reason is two-fold. 1) You could grow grapes and make wine because it was warm enough to (we were in a climate optimum both times). 2) The occupiers were of Roman and then French descent (the Normans showed up in 1066), both known for their love of wine. I can certainly speak for the former. Obviously, the northern tastes are more toward ales, and this combined with the cooling lead to the necessary change from the fruit of the vine to the harvest of the field.

What about the ski industry?

Looks like there are plenty where people usually go to ski — the Alps.

And locations north of the UK still have theirs.

A big hint to all this lies in the cyclical nature of the oceans. The shift in the Pacific in 1978, called the Great Pacific Climatic Shift, from cold to warm naturally started elevating global temperatures, and that was followed by shifts in the IOD (Indian Ocean Dipole) and, most importantly for Europe and the Arctic, the Atlantic to its warm phase. It does not take a science guy, just common sense, to understand the earth’s major warm ocean bodies, with 1000x the heat capacity of the air, would have a warming effect on the planet. (Inconvenient truth: Warming oceans also release CO2.) But why quibble with such trivialities as the ocean when you can just label people like the late Dr. William Gray, who had 50 years of experience in the field and a PhD — something Bill does not have — delusional? Perhaps a read of his paper is in order.

Here’s what it comes down to. By saying CO2 is now the climate control knob, i.e. 100% responsible, you are denying (there’s that word) the entire history of the CO2-temperature relationship in the known history of the planet.

Also being denied is that warmer times, including when grapes were grown in Britain, were called climate optimums because life flourished then.

And the increase even has a diminishing return.

I had the chance to talk with Bill Nye for about three hours in my home. He is not an evil demon, he is a man who believes he is right and wants to change the world for better. That is what he believes. The problems for me start when you resort to some of the things he has recently advocated — jailing people or, in the case above, labeling people delusional. And that’s a bit of a shame, for two reasons. 1) It’s step one toward the type of despotic view that people who think they know better try to force on others. That is not freedom, and that is not science. 2) He is someone who really brought science to the forefront. I have a picture of two former pro football players, Chris and Keith Conlin, choking me cause they told me to lay off Bill Nye.

No, I am not going soft, because it’s the totality of the journey that has to be looked at. But diminishing whatever authority you may have had before (if these two guy watched Bill Nye, then he has gotten a lot of exposure) with this kind of thing seems to be out of line to me. One is always taught to “Finish Strong.” The argument here is not that the climate does not change — it always has and always will — but it involves, in my opinion, three main points that sum up my position:

1.) How much is man responsible for variances that were previously exclusively natural?

In my opinion, most of the warmth today is likely natural given the tiny amounts of CO2 relative to the entire system, of which the oceans have 1000x the heat capacity and are the great thermostat of the planet, taking centuries of action and reaction to reach where they are now.

2.) Is this worth the draconian reactions that will handcuff the greatest experiment in freedom and prosperity in history, the United States of America?

3.) This question may arise, if one wants: Would not the cost of adaptation to such things, rather than trying to correct what has always happened in the past anyway, be a sounder fiscal response?

Now does that seem delusional or worthy of jail time?

I suggest Bill finish strong with his argument, but not by what is a soft tyranny of suggesting jail time or demeaning others, some with far more education and experience than he.

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Senate votes to confirm former Texas governor Rick Perry as energy secretary

Former Texas governor Rick Perry won confirmation Thursday as President Trump’s energy secretary. Now comes the hard part.

The Senate voted 62 to 37 Thursday afternoon to confirm Perry as energy secretary, brushing aside his onetime vow to abolish the department.

The genial Republican drew less fire from Democrats during his confirmation process than other Trump nominees, but Perry now faces many of the same tough issues over regulations, the department’s activities to slow climate change and potentially deep cuts in manpower and spending.

As Texas governor, Perry presided over a boom in all kinds of energy production, including wind power and shale drilling. Many of his supporters cited that record as evidence that he could help a similarly wide variety of energy interests.

But Perry’s foes criticized his tepid acknowledgment of climate change, his strong ties to his state’s oil and gas industry, and his lack of experience with the department’s main budgetary area, the maintenance of the nation’s nuclear stockpile. And they wondered whether he will be able to protect the department’s national laboratories and other scientific research against those who would slash the budget.

It is something of a surprise landing for Perry, who ran for president in 2012 and 2016 with dismal results. During a presidential debate in 2011, he famously forgot the name of the department, one of three he had pledged to eliminate.

“Perry would join the ranks of other unqualified candidates chosen by this president to lead critically important agencies with very specific and complex functions,” Sen. Patty Murray (D- Wash.) said on the Senate floor just before the vote.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) replied that as governor Perry “created an environment where all energy producers could not just succeed but really prosper.” He said he hoped Perry would rely on “these same principles.”

The Energy Department is a basket of different activities. Most of its budget goes to maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile and cleaning up an old weapons site in Hanford, Wash. It runs the national laboratories, sets appliance standards, hands out loans and grants for basic research and early stage energy technologies from carbon capture and storage to battery technology.

Renewable energy supporters expressed hope.

“As Governor of Texas, Rick Perry saw firsthand the positive economic impact as the Lone Star state diversified its energy production mix, resulting in more than 143,000 advanced energy jobs, success integrating more wind onto the grid than anywhere else, improving energy efficiency, and now experiencing a solar boom,” said Malcolm Woolf, senior vice president for policy and government affairs at the business-backed Advanced Energy Economy. “We look forward to working with DOE Secretary Perry, to continue this significant business opportunity to expand advanced energy that now supports more than 3 million workers across the nation.”

So too did the nation’s appliance makers, whose products are regulated for energy efficiency by the Energy Department. Stephen Yurek, president of the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, said “it is important that the Secretary ensure that the regulatory process, now 40 years old and in need of significant reform, operates fairly and consistently for all stakeholders.”

But the environmental group 350.org executive director May Boeve said in a statement that  “Trump just added one more unqualified fossil fuel shill and climate-denier to his cabinet.”

Friends of the Earth senior strategic adviser Damon Moglen noted: “Over the course of his career, Rick Perry has taken millions of dollars from the oil, gas and nuclear industries while pushing their dirty energy agenda.”

He added, “Unlike the preeminent physicists who ran the department for the last eight years, Perry lacks the knowledge and experience to run the DOE.” Moglen called the idea that Perry would be able to clean up the nation’s nuclear weapons facilities an “absurdity.”

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Science deniers in the wind industry  

The human health consequences of manipulated measurements

Helen Schwiesow Parker, PhD, LCP              

Like the tobacco industry before it, the wind industry has spent decades vehemently denying known harmful consequences associated with its product, while promoting its fraudulent feel-good image. Dismissing or denying the serious health impacts of industrial-scale wind turbines is wishful thinking, akin to insisting that tobacco is harmless because we enjoy it.

The problem with wind energy is not just its costly, subsidized, unreliable electricity; the need to back up every megawatt with redundant fossil-fuel power; or its impacts on wildlife and their habitats.

Infrasound (inaudible) and low-frequency (audible) noise (slowly vibrating sound waves collectively referred to as ILFN) produced by Industrial-scale Wind Turbines (IWTs) directly and predictably cause adverse human health effects.  The sonic radiation tends to be amplified within structures, and sensitivity to the impact of the resonance increases with continuing exposure.

These facts have been known to the wind industry and the US government since the 1980s when it became a ‘hot topic,’ with numerous studies presented and published by acousticians working under grants from the Departments of Energy, Defense and NASA. The wind industry response?

Deny the science.  Insist that “what you can’t hear can’t hurt you.” Claim that “neighbors will get used to it.” Measure only outside dwellings, and allow only noise measurements in the field that reflect the relative loudness perceived by the human ear, while drastically reducing sound-level readings in the lower frequencies that are known to cause problems.

From a distance, many view the massive turbines as majestic – as a clean, seemingly quiet and free source of endless energy. To untold thousands of families clustered within 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) or more of the pulsing machines, however, the IWTs bring strangely debilitating illness – increasingly incapacitating for some, yet scoffed at by wind proponents.

Common sense tells us that fifty-story-tall metal structures with blades as long as football fields moving at 180 mph at their tips would negatively impact quiet neighborhoods. But the extent and severity of the IWT’s effect on body, mind and spirit comes as a surprise to most people.

“When I’m at home I’m usually sick with headaches, nausea, vertigo, tinnitus, anxiety, hopelessness, depression. My ears pop a lot and I hardly ever sleep…. Suicide looks to be my only relief.  Land of the FREE Home of the BULLSHIT! … Million to one odds anybody contacts me back.”

The primary pathway of turbine assault on human health is no mystery. The Israeli army has used low-frequency sound pulses as high-tech crowd control for years. People are made nauseous and confused, with blurred vision, vertigo, headaches, tachycardia, heightened blood pressure, pain and ringing in the ears, difficulties with memory and concentration, anxiety, depression, irritability, and panic attacks.

This also describes the Wind Turbine Syndrome (WTS), a constellation of symptoms first given a name by the brilliant young MD/PhD, Nina Pierpont. She followed her astute and compassionate observations of turbine neighbors around the world with epidemiological research, using a robust case-crossover statistical design: subjects experienced symptoms that varied with proximity to the turbines. When the same subjects were placed at a greater distance from the turbines, their symptoms abated; returning them to the scene brought the symptoms back.

Michigan State University noise engineers explain that “Inaudible components [ILFN] can induce resonant vibration in liquids, gases and solids … bodily tissues and cavities – potentially harmful to humans.” A subject in the groundbreaking Cooper study describes how the resonance shows up in a glass of water on her kitchen table, and in the toilet bowl, and how she feels it in her body.

Pierpont hypothesized that a significant pathway from ILFN to symptoms might include disruption to balance mechanisms located in the inner ear.

Dr. Alec Salt and colleagues, otolaryngologists at Washington University, later found that inaudible ILFN reaches the brain via inner ear Outer Hair Cell (OHC) displacement, leading indeed to unfamiliar and disturbing sensations paralleling WTS.

As turbine size trends upward, the sickening ILFN emissions worsen. There’s a lot of money riding on keeping the science under the radar of public awareness, and regulations to a minimum.

When Denmark’s EPA proposed tightening turbine noise regulations to protect turbine neighbors from increasing ILFN (May 2011), the Vestas CEO wrote the DEPA Minister, asserting: “It simply isn’t technically possible to curtail the ILFN output,” and “Increased distance requirements [setbacks from residences] cannot be met whilst maintaining a satisfactory business outcome for the investor.”’ DEPA folded, turning instead to looser standards that were “likely to be copied by other countries.”

Although alerted to the increased endangerment of turbine neighbors around the world, the press remained silent, and Big Wind’s central players ramped up their game plan undeterred.

In addition to the impact of ILFN radiation, turbine neighbors suffer from Turbine “Flicker” – a strobe-like effect caused by turbine blades alternately blocking and allowing sunlight to skim rhythmically and repeatedly across the land, or ricochet in bursts across interior walls and stairwells.

The direct impact extends to nearly a mile from the turbine – long after sunrise, and again long before sunset. It is mesmerizing, disorienting, and often brings on nausea, dizziness, lightheadedness, irritability, even panic, indoors or outside.

Repetitive sleep disturbance and stress-related symptoms are the most common health complaints of IWT neighbors.  The audible sound constantly fluctuates, described as akin to low-flying jets or the rumble of helicopters, “freakish, screeching sound sludge.”  It is unnatural.  People say the noise gets into your head, and you can’t get it out.

Advising the Falmouth, MA Board of Health, Dr. William Hallstein wrote: “All varieties of illnesses are destabilized, secondary to inadequate sleep: diabetic blood sugars, cardiac rhythms, migraines, tissue healing. Psychiatric problems intensify … all in the ‘normal’ brain. Errors in judgment and accident rates increase.”

As with seasickness, not everyone is similarly affected. But for many, the experience becomes literally intolerable. Devastated families and individuals around the world, having lost their health, jobs or farms, return their keys to the bank, sell their homes at fire-sale prices, or simply pack up and flee. Some never recover their health.

(For more details on this human health travesty, see my three-part series on MasterResource.org)

The continuing expansion of Big Wind is a tale of money and power shunting aside integrity and compassion, abetted by a disinterested news media, leading to an un-informed public, further betrayed by “human rights advocates” loathe to break ranks from popular positions.

The myth that “saving the world” requires tolerating the costs of Big Wind could not be further from the truth.  Responsible stewardship demands critical thinking, common sense and grade school science, not just following Big Wind’s Pied Piper and supposedly good intentions.

In fact, allowing wind into the energy mix squanders our non-renewable environment and taxpayer billions that are greatly needed elsewhere, wasting them on the most idiotic of engineering conceits.

Reliance on wind actually increases emissions and fossil fuel use overall, due to inefficiencies introduced into the system. Big Wind eliminates none of the need for conventional capacity, but rather consumes vast quantities of additional fuel and raw materials, while spewing emissions during the manufacture, transportation, construction and maintenance of the enormous redundant turbines and their uniquely demanding infrastructure.

The Wind Game is nothing but an obscenely costly, mostly useless energy redundancy scheme. It funnels unimaginable profits from our taxpayer and rate-payer pockets to its inner circle, while knowingly ignoring its victims’ desperate pleas for relief – and indeed ridiculing them and trying to bury all the growing evidence of harm to their health and wellbeing.

We’ve witnessed three decades of this callous, mercenary assault, this arrogant denial of what is known to be true, this untold suffering of thousands of innocent victims around the world. It’s time to bring in the human rights and social justice referees – and call “game over.”

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COMMENT from a reader:

It is interesting to note that much study has been dedicated to micro wave emissions,  Magnetic field exposure, cell phone radio wave emissions, noise exposure, atomic radiation and so forth all with the intent to determine any ill effects, but the wind industry relies on ignoring the possibility of any health related fall out even when long term exposure of real people level a complaint. I wonder how elephants and polar bears and whales are reacting to these low level sound waves. They communicate in these tones so do they now hear a demented beast  crying out from a mid America cornfield to be freed.

We Must Save the Environment – From the Environmentalists

The joke is so old and repetitive – because the joke that is environmentalism and environmentalists is so old and repetitive.  Time and again, nigh every time environmentalists gather to gripe about some fairy tale or other – or to simply listen to tunes, turn on, tune in and drop out – they have left behind an environmental disaster.

Remember Woodstock?  The 1969 Peace, Love and Narcotics concert in New York state?  These “Love Your Mother Earth” Gaia worshippers – left the concert field looking like a nuclear trash bomb had been dropped.  Ironic – given the Hippies’ “No Nukes” movement.

Flash forward forty years.  Remember Occupy Wall Street?  That was the second iteration of the Left’s series of failed attempts to replicate the germane grassroots magic of the Tea Party (remember the Coffee Party?).  Occupy’s chief complaint was against corporations (about which they vigorously complained on Twitter, Inc. and Facebook, Inc. – via their Apple, Inc. iPhones and Samsung, Inc. Galaxies).  Of course a component of their anti-corporation sentiment – was that corporations are destroying the planet.  They’re evil, they’re giant – and they mass-pollute.

You know who definitely destroyed their little corners of the planet?  Occupy Wall Street.  “They…were…the 99%” – of the massive mess makers in their anti-corporate equation.  They defecated and urinated on police cars.  Because – classy.  They lived in filth – and left it behind when they vamoosed.  Leaving the corporations and straight-job-having-taxpayers they loathe to pick up the tab for their noxious tantrums.

Has the Left finally learned its lesson?  Have the planet’s alleged physicians finally healed themselves?  Of course not.  The joke then – is still the joke now.  Behold the Dakota Access Pipeline protest.

The environmental-disaster environmentalists gathered along the North Dakota-South Dakota border to protest a certain section of the aforementioned pipeline.  And that gathering – was a donation-cash-cow.

GoFundMe and FundRazr pages were established – and the coin rolled.  Official Sacred Stone Camp – $3,125,550.  Sacred Stone Camp Legal Defense Fund – $2,982,763.  Veterans for Standing Rock – $1,155,770.  Water Protector Legal Collective – $627,374.  #BuildWithStandingRock Community – $537,555.  Last Real Indians #NoDAPL Aid – $378,402.  And on, and on, and….

In toto, nearly $14 million was raised in the name of stopping the pipeline (which they ultimately failed to do – as President Donald Trump signed off on its completion).   “Leftist Volunteer Protester” is, as always, a highly lucrative gig.  (Except when the Leftist paymasters stiff you.)

Now it is understandable that rank-and-file Leftist protest gadflies aren’t used to earning money – and are thus unfamiliar with the concept of income taxes. So North Dakota Tax Commissioner Ryan Rauschenberger issued a gentle reminder: “‘[We’re] looking at the entities that have potential paid contractors here on their behalf doing work.’…Mr. Rauschenberger said red flags will be raised if he doesn’t start seeing W2 or 1099 tax forms from those affiliated with the protest arriving at his office.”

$14 million for volunteer protesters – is a lot of coin.  But it is way less than the $33 million taxpayers have already had to pay – to deal with the highly-compensated volunteer protesters.  And along with the wasted money, thousands and thousands of civil servant man hours have been wasted babysitting them.  If you live anywhere near this Leftist pipeline cabal and had to, while being robbed or assaulted, wait a whole lot longer for the cops to show – it is because they were diverted to dealing with this Leftist pipeline cabal.

And taxpayers aren’t yet finished paying for this Leftist mess.  Because the Leftists – left yet another mess.

$6 million of the $14 million raised – went directly to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.  The Indians protesting the pipeline.  The coin was donated to allegedly address three things: legal fees for their lawsuits against the Army Corps of Engineers, waste management at the protest site – and to offset Indian casino gambling revenue losses incurred because of the protest they were leading.

Get that last bit?  They led a protest they knew would cost them money – and they had the audacity to ask people to compensate them for their self-inflicted wounds.  The other two reasons for the titanic coin – make even less sense.

Legal fees?  EarthJustice – the environmentalist lawyer group representing the Tribe – doesn’t charge its clients.  (And EarthJustice is undoubtedly raising money its own self on their ridiculous pipeline litigiousness.)

Waste management?  The protesters appear to know less about this – than they do about income tax: “Sanitation crews are working hard to dispose of six months’ worth of garbage from a community the size of Wahpeton or Valley City. The mountains of debris need to be moved before the spring thaw occurs….’Standing Rock Environmental Protection Agency and Dakota Sanitation are working together to try and advert an environmental tragedy,’ says Tom Doering, Morton County Emergency Manager.  It’s estimated it will take 250 trucks filled with litter to clear the camp….Each load that’s dumped is inspected by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department.”

Get that?  All of that cleanup work – is being done taxpayer-funded government entities.  Not by anyone paid by the Tribe.  And it doesn’t end there: “The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has moved into the evacuated Dakota Access pipeline protest camp to finish the cleanup….”

Get that?  The (again, taxpayer-funded) Army Corps of Engineers is being sued by the Tribe – and has to pay to clean up after the Tribe.  While the Tribe sits on the millions it raised – putatively to pay for clean up.

Again, the anti-environment environmentalists joke – is a very old one.  It wasn’t funny then – it isn’t funny now.

But it does make it nigh impossible to take environmentalism and environmentalists seriously.

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Australia’s record-breaking summer heat linked to climate change (?)

This is just modelling:  Games with numbers.  There has been no statistically significant change for decades anyway.  So there is nothing to link to.  Big fraud!

The record-breaking heat seen across southeast Australia in the last few months was made 50 times more likely by climate change, according to new analysis that links the heat directly to global warming.

Southeast Australia was struck by three major heatwaves in January and February, with temperatures climbing as high as 113°F (45°C) in some places. On February 10, Sydney Airport recorded its hottest February day on record, with temperatures hitting 109°F (42°C). The heat was also uncharacteristically persistent — Observatory Hill in Sydney saw temperatures reach above 95°F (35°C) for nine consecutive days in January, breaking a 120-year old record. Elsewhere, the consistent heat was even more extreme: in Moore, New South Wales, there were 52 consecutive days with temperatures above 95°F (35°C).

The study, conducted by the World Weather Attribution Program at Climate Central, used climate model simulations and observational data analysis to understand how climate change, caused by an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, might have made these heat events more likely. They found that climate change made the average temperatures seen this summer in Australia 50 times more likely, and made the maximum summer temperatures 10 times more likely.

“In the past, a summer as hot as 2016–2017 was a roughly 1 in 500-year event,” the researchers wrote. “Today, climate change has increased the odds to roughly 1 in 50 years — a 10-fold increase in frequency.”

The analysis also warns that heat events like these — both punctuated heatwaves and long stretches of above-average temperatures — are likely to become more frequent as climate change continues. In the future, according to the study, heat events like the one this summer could happen as frequently as every five years — and will likely be more intense, with temperatures averaging at least 1.8ºF (1°C) warmer than they were in the past.

The connection between heat waves and climate change has strong scientific support. In 2015, eight papers published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s attribution report — an annual report that explains extreme weather events from a climate perspective — all linked climate change to heatwaves, showing that climate change clearly made heatwaves either more likely, more intense, or both.

According to data from NASA and NOAA, 2016 was the hottest year on record. Before that, both 2015 and 2014 held that distinction. In fact, 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred since 2001.

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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