Early Collapse of Arctic Sea Ice Is Another Ominous Sign of Rapid Warming (?)

After reading the heading above, you would be forgiven for believing that the Arctic ice as a whole is shrinking.  On careful reading below, however, we find that it is only a few bits of the Arctic that are collapsing.  The Arctic as a whole is no more melted than it was in 1940

Temperatures and other features over the Arctic are highly varied so the Warmists can always cherrypick some bit that suits their propaganda


Earth's already-beleaguered northern icecap suffered another blow this month with the early collapse of a barrier that kept some of Arctic's most durable ice in place.

The ice arch across the Nares Strait, which separates Greenland from Ellesmere Island in Canada's far northeast, gave way two months earlier than usual, said Laurence Dyke, a paleoglaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

"On May 10, this arch disintegrated, leaving the oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic vulnerable to being swept south where it will melt away," Dyke told Seeker. "Over the last two weeks, the area of broken ice has expanded massively to the north, and lots of Arctic sea ice is flowing southwards through the Nares Strait."

The channel and the Lincoln Sea, at the northern tip of Greenland, are normally covered by a sheet of ice several meters thick until around July, Dyke said. Usually, ice sheets that cover the strait are anchored to land and don't move, blocking the passage of sea ice through the strait.

But as heat-trapping fossil-fuel emissions like carbon dioxide build up in the atmosphere, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. And this year, land-anchored ice in the strait failed to form amid the record warmth and record low sea ice coverage recorded across the Arctic. That left only an arch of ice at the northern end of the strait, where it joined the Lincoln Sea — the structure that gave way earlier this month.

"This is especially important as the Lincoln Sea contains the last bastion of old, thick multi-year sea ice," Dyke said.

The Nares Strait is the smaller of two passages that can funnel ice from that area toward the Atlantic.

The Fram Strait, on the east side of Greenland, carries "significantly more," said Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado — "But every little bit counts."

And the loss of multi-year ice is already a chronic problem in the Arctic. It forms the heart of next year's sea ice and provides habitat for whales, seals, and birds.

"It's also playing a role to reduce the amount of heat the ocean can take in during the summer," Moon said. If less ice is floating on the surface of the Arctic ocean, the dark-colored sea will absorb more of the Sun's energy — "and of course, more heat in the ocean reduces our sea ice further, and we get a runaway effect."

"Each of these small events adds up, and they're not good news," she added.

This year's event isn't unprecedented: Something similar happened in 2007. But when that occurred, "that led to the largest flux of Arctic Sea ice through Nares Strait in at least the last 15 years," Dyke said.

"Multi-year ice has been steadily declining over the last two decades, and this early break-up will surely destroy another large portion of it," he said.

Since sea ice is floating in water already, its melting doesn't add to sea-level rise — which a recent study suggests has accelerated dramatically since the 1990s. But the warming of the surrounding oceans is already starting to eat away at the miles of ice that cover Greenland.

SOURCE




Open letter to President Trump: Please Exit the Paris Climate Treaty

Are you are still wondering whether to Exit Paris? Overseas and US officials, environmentalists and bureaucrats urge you to Remain. But you promised voters you would Exit. Please keep your promises.

Exit Paris isn’t about the environment. It’s about letting us utilize our fossil fuel energy to create jobs, rebuild our economy, and Make America Great Again. It’s about avoiding immense transfer payments from the USA to foreign governments, bureaucrats and parties unaccountable to Trump-voting taxpayers.

Worse, even if the USA Remains, and the repulsive payments flow, Paris offers no help in removing real air pollutants. Carbon dioxide isn’t one of them, by the way: it’s plant food, not poison.

Exit Paris: Business

Some high profile American companies recently signed a note urging Remain. Follow the money. Many leaders of those companies didn’t support your election and voted Hillary. And they expect to get billions from us taxpayers and consumers, for locking up our fossil fuels and switching to renewable energy.

We who voted Trump, your base, want Exit. Just as you promised.

Remain, so that we maintain markets for American energy technologies? Some companies will make off like bandits. The rest of us will get skewered. Global buyers of energy systems understand the benefits of America’s world-beating fossil technologies. They understand the life-cycle value of after-sales support poorly delivered by our international competitors. Trust Chinese warranties? We don’t either.

Why ask corporations about Remain or Exit Paris? They pass Remain-driven energy costs on to consumers. Instead, ask consumers about ever-increasing energy bills. You’ll get a different answer.

Corporations have shareholders in the USA, of course, and some of them elected you. But corporations also have European shareholders. Corporations there must survive political economies aligned with Paris’s unaccountable bureaucratic control of energy, jobs, economic growth and living standards. You have to choose: shareholders, entrepreneurs, consumers and families – or rent seekers and bureaucrats.

Renewable energy lobbyists, Obama holdovers – and misguided souls in your own administration – say Remain, to keep a seat at the table. That’s nonsense. Businesses were flogged by the past administration and no longer recognize their obligations to shareholders, much less to societies they are supposed to serve with reliable, affordable power that creates and preserves jobs.

Those companies responded to incentives in a massively hostile American political economy. Those hostilities represent decades-long campaigns by anti-energy groups that got rich while claiming to represent shareholders, and by foreign governments seeking transfer payments. You promised change.

Exit Paris: Group of Seven

Mr. President, you’ll be pressured mightily at the G7 to Remain Paris. Hugely-invested and conflicted world leaders will give you no peace. Your delegation will hound you. Keep your Exit staff close. Why?

Because America got snookered into signing the Arctic Council’s May 11, 2017, Fairbanks Declaration. Now the same pro-Remain forces will claim America wants that language. What language?

Start with Perambulatory Paragraphs 8 & 9: “Reaffirming the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the need for their realization by 2030.” And this: “U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 13.a: Implement the commitment undertaken by developed country parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion annually by 2020 from all sources to address the needs of developing countries in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, and fully operationalize the Green Climate Fund through its capitalization as soon as possible.”

They want to take our money, while they shackle our economy. But there’s more.

 Paragraph 31 (p. 6): “…we welcome the updated assessment of Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic, note with concern its findings, and adopt its recommendations.…The Arctic states, permanent participants, and observers to the Arctic Council, should individually and collectively lead global efforts for an early, ambitious, and full implementation of the Paris COP21 Agreement….”

Your State Department Obama-carry-overs slipped this one past their boss, Secretary Tillerson – and you, by extension. This is where the real art of the deal comes in. Take a leadership role and terminate this. Don’t get sandbagged. Don’t sandbag the people who voted for you. Resist the pressures you’ll face in Sicily. Anything but Exit Paris undermines your credibility and betrays voter trust and America’s future.

Exit Paris: Diplomacy

One reason cited to Remain Paris and Remain UNFCCC and their climate treaties is to “avoid diplomatic blowback.” There certainly will be that, but it’s a cost far more easily borne than the sum of what we paid yesterday and will be told we must pay tomorrow in lost energy, jobs and money. Follow the money:

Emerging nations want the USA to Remain because they expect billions in cash from us every year – plus free technology transfers – at US corporate, taxpayer and consumer expense. Advanced countries want us to Remain because we will inadvertently fund and sign onto programs that they use to seize ever-greater bureaucratic control over energy, resources, jobs and living standards, within their own borders and ours.

The Chinese want us to Remain because it protects access to our market for energy technologies. Do you believe Chinese press releases and speeches that claim they are switching massively to renewable energy? Neither do we. But we see them building more coal-fired power plants in China, Africa and elsewhere.

Europeans want us to Remain in Paris to ensure that our fossil fuels, energy prices, economy, jobs, living standards and ability to compete globally are as shackled by climate insanity as theirs already are.

Some say Remain Paris for a seat at the table. Will the planet otherwise forget American leadership? Better that the deal crumbles without us making huge transfer payments and shackling our economy. Even better is that you lead America and the world back from the climate hysteria precipice.

Anti-America, anti-energy forces unite at the UN and its UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Its director, Ambassador Espinosa of Mexico, spoke recently at Georgetown University – to advocate greater bureaucratic control over energy, natural resources, jobs, living standards and human lives. The past administration was in lock-step with this. You should absolutely be against every part of it.

Exit Paris: Science

Paris is a horrible idea, since unassailable empirical evidence demonstrates that: Carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster and better. Atmospheric CO2 levels trail rather than lead warming. Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas. Thanks to carbon dioxide, agricultural productivity has increased over recent decades by over $3.2 trillion. Scientists project up to $10 trillion more in improved crop yields over the coming decades.

Climate science is absolutely not settled. Smart scientists who support you prove there’s no credible path to climate cataclysm due to fossil fuel use and CO2 increases. Doomsayers have gotten rich by peddling false, alarmist, anti-scientific claims, while the rest of us have suffered. This must not continue.

To support Exit Paris, you should reverse the absurd, scientifically unsupportable claim that carbon dioxide “endangers” our welfare. Doing that will substantially remove the ability of subsequent administrations to restore policies that demonize fossil fuels and CO2. Many of the policies addressed and corrected by your recent environmental Executive Order are vulnerable until the endangerment finding disappears. Much of the mischief and job killing of the last eight years can be laid at that doorstep.

Exit Paris, because even outgoing EPA officials admit it will not noticeably affect Earth’s temperature.

Exit Paris: US Politics

Paris intentionally provides for ever-tightening restrictions on American citizens and businesses – thus far with no vote by us or the Senate. Who rewrote our Constitution to allow a president, in his final days in office, to impose such a far reaching treaty on us without our advice, consent, approval or vote?

If you need Exit support of fellow elected officials or a constitutional avenue, submit Remain Paris to the Senate. The measure will crash on that rocky shore, giving you all the support you need to Exit Paris.

Your voters heard you promise to Exit Paris. The support you still enjoy from your voters is because we see that you are keeping your promises. Keep this one, too, Mr. President.

Please Exit Paris. Those who voted for you will remember and approve. Those who detest and resist you will still detest and resist you if you Remain.

Thank you for considering our heartfelt analysis.

Sincerely,

Paul K. Driessen and Mark J. Carr

Via email





A reply to a miserable Greenie moan

THE MOAN:  “Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.”

The American Automobile Association predicts that 39.3 million Americans will hit the open road this Memorial Day weekend, a million more this year than last. Affordable, reliable, widely available gasoline and diesel is a big reason. And maybe Americans feel energy-liberated by the current Administration.

While we wait for the anti-energy, glass-emptying Center for American Progress (not Prosperity) to psychologically retool, the rest of us can be optimistic.

Get happy. Summer beckons. Not only bike and hike but also drive, bus, train, and fly to a better environment–your self-selected environment.

The automobile is environmentalism-on-wheels. The open road is freedom to escape the concrete for the great beyond. Mountains, rivers, hills, forests, even beautiful green golf courses–it is all a drive away. (And if it makes you happy CAP, those ‘huge profits’ of “Big Oil’ are a few years absent.)

Each year, MasterResource celebrates the beginning of the peak-driving season knowing that our free-market philosophy is about energy abundance and affordability and reliability. And there is little to apologize for. When is the last time you got a bad tank of gasoline, anyway?

Oil, gas, and coal have been and continue to be technologically transformed into super-clean energy resources. Carbon-based energies are growing more abundant, not less. And energy/climate alarmism is losing steam on all fronts (except the shouting).

The real energy sustainability problem is statism, not free consumer choice. As Matt Ridley concluded: “There is little doubt that the damage being done by climate-change policies currently exceeds the damage being done by climate change.” As Alex Epstein is telling each one of us to tell our neighbors: I Love Fossil Fuels.

Energy is the master resource. Motorized transportation is freedom-of-movement. So, like that old Shell commercial said, Let’s Go!

SOURCE





L.A.’s promise to join the Paris Agreement is a wee bit presumptuous

Symbolic politics only

This week, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted that if the United States dropped from the deal, the city would sign on.
Just one problem, Garcetti: That’s not really a thing.

The legal infrastructure of the Paris Agreement doesn’t technically allow for cities to join, although cities and businesses have made big commitments to cut emissions alongside the agreement.

Political gimmicks aside, the mayor’s pledge shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. As Adam Rogers writes in Wired, Garcetti has mentioned joining Paris before.

California has actively framed itself as the head of the opposition to Trump’s takedown of progressive policies, and some in the state — like state Sen. Kevin De León, a Democrat — have also floated whether California could officially join the pact.

SOURCE






The Possible Reasons Big Corporations Are So Eager for Trump to Break His Promise on Paris Climate Deal

European countries and major corporations are pressuring President Donald Trump to remain in the Paris climate agreement despite his promises on the campaign trail to withdraw the United States from the Obama-era deal that never gained congressional approval.

The Trump administration so far is sticking with being undecided—at least until Trump returns to the United States from his first foreign trip, where on Friday, he’s meeting with Group of Seven ally countries, which support the agreement.

Back home, the pressure is growing from multinational corporations, even the energy sector, which have opposed stricter limitations on carbon.

Exxon Mobil Corp., once run by Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP are urging the administration to remain in the agreement. Meanwhile, coal mining company Cloud Peak Energy urged the administration to remain.

“BP and Shell are European companies and it’s impossible to do business in Europe without towing the political line,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Signal. He added that for oil and gas companies, “the only way to get the price of gas back up is to kill coal. The Paris Agreement kills fossil fuels, but it kills coal first.”

Ebell was part of Trump’s transition team overseeing the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute sponsored an ad showing Trump during the campaign saying, “We are going to cancel the Paris climate agreement and stop all payments of the United States tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”

While corporate support might seem surprising, it’s very much the same old story for large companies seeking an advantage over smaller competitors, said Katie Tubb, a policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation.

“Big business and big government often go hand-in-hand. Big businesses generally can absorb and adapt to the costs of complying with burdensome regulation, of which Paris is a wellspring,” Tubb told The Daily Signal. “Smaller companies have a much harder time complying, which means less competition for big business. This is especially true if big business can influence the substance of regulations to favor themselves or freeze out competitors. I think in other cases; these large companies are just looking for PR points.”

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry led the United States into the Paris climate change agreement, along with 170 other countries. The agreement commits member countries to shift their energy industries away from fossil fuels and toward green energy.

Two dozen major U.S. companies—including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, the Hartford, Levi Strauss, PG&E, and Morgan Stanley—sent an open letter to Trump published in The New York Times and other newspapers across the country, urging him to remain in the deal. The letter says:

By requiring action by developed and developing countries alike, the agreement ensures a more balanced global effort, reducing the risk of competitive imbalances for U.S. companies … By expanding markets for innovative clean technologies, the agreement generates jobs and economic growth. U.S. companies are well positioned to lead in these markets.

U.S. business is best served by a stable and practical framework facilitating an effective and balanced global response. The Paris Agreement provides such a framework. As other countries invest in advanced technologies and move forward with the Paris Agreement, we believe the United States can best exercise global leadership and advance U.S. interests by remaining a full partner in this vital global effort.

Generally, larger energy companies have an advantage under the climate deal, said Fred Palmer, senior fellow for energy and climate at the Heartland Institute.

“Follow the money,” Palmer told The Daily Signal. “There are companies that want to game the system of using [carbon dioxide] as a currency to make money.”

After meetings at the Vatican earlier this week, Tillerson said, “The president indicated we’re still thinking about that, that he hasn’t made a final decision.”

Ahead of the G7 meeting, Trump chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told a pool reporter Friday that the president is weighing both sides.

“I think he’s leaning to understand the European position. Look, as you know from the U.S., there’s very strong views on both sides,” Cohn said. “He also knows that Paris has important meaning to many of the European leaders. And he wants to clearly hear what the European leaders have to say.”

Ebell warned that if the administration seeks to make a deal to stay in the agreement, perhaps with a lower commitment than the Obama administration pledged, then a future president could simply increase the U.S. commitment. That’s why, Ebell said, it’s best for the United States to get out.

“Obviously foreign leaders don’t care what Trump promised voters in the campaign,” Ebell said.

To be sure, many U.S. business groups oppose the Paris Agreement, such as the Industrial Energy Consumers of America—which represents manufacturers and other larger energy-using businesses—that wrote an April 24 letter to administration officials. The letter said:

We are the ones who eventually bear the costs of government imposed [greenhouse gas] reduction schemes. At the same time, we are often already economically disadvantaged, as compared to global competitors who are subsidized or protected by their governments.

Given the above concerns, IECA fails to see the benefit of the Paris Climate Accord. And, the long-term implications of the Paris Climate Accord, which includes greater future [greenhouse gas] reduction requirements, raises serious competitiveness and job implications for [energy-intensive, trade-exposed] industries.

SOURCE

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