Icebreaker sets record for earliest crossing of Northwest Passage

Another opportunity for dishonest propaganda.  I'm guessing that if previous explorers were on a ship that had four huge  Wärtsilä diesel engines and a hull of explosion-welded stainless steel they might have made better progress too.  This transit shows nothing about Arctic ice

There is however one amusing sentence below:  "Scientists predict the Northwest Passage will be largely ice free in the summer by 2050 if current levels of warming continue."  What?  IF!  Surely there is no doubt creeping in!  Maybe it's just caution.  Warmists have been predicting the vanishing of Arctic ice for years.  But no date they have put on it has ever proved right


After 24 days at sea and a journey spanning more than 6,000 miles, the Finnish icebreaker Nordica has set a new record for the earliest transit date of the fabled Northwest Passage.

The once-forbidding route through the Arctic, linking the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, has been opening up sooner and for a longer period each summer due to climate change. Sea ice that in years past foiled famous explorers and blocked the passage to all but the hardiest ships has slowly been melting away in one of the most visible effects of man-made global warming.

Records kept by Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans show that the previous earliest passage of the season happened in 2008, when the Canadian Coast Guard ship Louis L. St-Laurent left St. John's in Newfoundland on July 5 and arrived in the Beaufort Sea off Point Barrow on July 30.

The Nordica, with a team of researchers and Associated Press journalists on board, completed a longer transit in less time — and in the opposite direction — setting off from Vancouver on July 5 and reaching Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, on July 29.

While the icebreaker encountered Chinese cargo vessels, Alaskan fishing boats and a German cruise ship in the Pacific, upon entering the Canadian Archipelago, the Nordica traveled alone. Radar indicated the presence of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Sherman near Point Barrow; along the coast an occasional collection of houses revealed evidence of human settlement in the far north.

For the most part, the ship's only companions were Arctic sea birds, seals and the occasional whale, until two-thirds of the way through the voyage, as Nordica was plowing through sea ice in Victoria Strait, a crew member sighted a polar bear.

These animals have come to symbolize the threat posed to Arctic wildlife by climate change because the sea ice they depend on for hunting is disappearing a bit more each year. Scientists predict the Northwest Passage will be largely ice free in the summer by 2050 if current levels of warming continue.

For now, the passage remains a challenge for conventional ships and efforts are being made to prevent frozen waterways that the local Inuit population depends on for travel from being opened up. Yet tourism and other forms of economic development are already underway.

As Nordica sailed through Baffin Bay, the far corner of the North Atlantic that separates Canada and Greenland, it passed cargo ships lining up in the distance. They were preparing to pick up iron ore from a mine on Baffin Island that's expected to operate for decades to come.

One of the early expeditions to find the Northwest Passage, led by British explorer John Franklin, was last sighted off Baffin Island on July 26, 1845. The expedition never made it. Trapped by sea ice, Franklin and his men perished from cold, illness and starvation. Their two ships were found in 2014 and 2016, not far from where Nordica sighted its first polar bear.

SOURCE




Here’s How Wrong Past Environmental Predictions Have Been

Walter E. Williams

Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom.

Let’s take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today’s environmentalists’ predictions.

In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of “The Population Bomb,” declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies.

In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.”

He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain’s Institute of Biology: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, “In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”

Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

In International Wildlife (July 1975), Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”

In Science News (1975), C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization is reported as saying, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

In 2000, climate researcher David Viner told The Independent, a British newspaper, that within “a few years,” snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”

In the following years, the U.K. saw some of its largest snowfalls and lowest temperatures since records started being kept in 1914.

In 1970, ecologist Kenneth Watt told a Swarthmore College audience:

The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.

Also in 1970, Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-Wis., wrote in Look magazine: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian (Institution), believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

Scientist Harrison Brown published a chart in Scientific American that year estimating that mankind would run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver were to disappear before 1990.

Erroneous predictions didn’t start with Earth Day.

In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last for only another 13 years. In 1949, the secretary of the interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight.

Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey said the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas.

The fact of the matter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, is that as of 2014, we had 2.47 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, which should last about a century.

Hoodwinking Americans is part of the environmentalist agenda. Environmental activist Stephen Schneider told Discover magazine in 1989:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. … Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

In 1988, then-Sen. Timothy Wirth, D-Colo., said: “We’ve got to … try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong … we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Americans have paid a steep price for buying into environmental deception and lies.

SOURCE




AL GORE CAN’T SAVE THE GLOBAL WARMING CULT: The fake science has been exposed

Following Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, Al Gore is releasing an update of his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It’s called An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, in which no doubt we will hear the same apocalyptic hysteria of its predecessor, and the same lurid predictions that will never come true. The difference between the 2006 Academy Award winner and the updated version is that now volumes of counter-evidence and exposure of the manipulation of climate data make it obvious that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a progressive cult-belief and alternative energy boondoggle, not real science.

Earlier this month PJMedia covered a new report that seriously challenges the data all warmists rely on to buttress their case that the planet has been steadily warming to disastrous levels. This peer-reviewed paper examines how the raw data from weather stations are manipulated and altered by the three main purveyors of temperature data known as Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST)––The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research––before being used by other researchers. Incorporating more reliable satellite temperature data­­––which for going on two decades do not show any meaningful rise in temperature, let alone the steep rise that the GAST data show––the authors come to this devastating conclusion:

The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent year have been the warmest ever––despite current claims of record setting warming.

Moreover, the legitimate need to control for any environmental factors that could distort raw temperatures has been abused to produce a preordained conclusion:

While the notion that some “adjustments” to historical data might need to be made is not challenged, logically it would be expected that such historical temperature data adjustments would sometimes raise these temperatures, and sometimes lower them. This situation would mean that the impact of such adjustments on the temperature trend line slope is uncertain. However, each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history.

These types of manipulation of data, however, have been obvious going back to 1998 and Michael Mann’s infamous “Hockey Stick” graph, in which the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250), when temperatures were about as hot as they are today, was erased to show a steep linear rise in temperatures. And NOAA’s manipulation of data also has been exposed by the Real Climate Science blog, which examines NOAA’s charts and graphs claiming to show that 2016 was the hottest year on record, and U.S. temperatures have increased 1.5°F since the 19th century. In fact, critical analysis reveals that in 2016, “The percentage of hot days was below average, and ranked 80th since 1895. Only 4.4% of days were over 95°F, compared with the long term average of 4.9%.”

As for the second claim of a 1.5°F rise, “NOAA creates the warming trend by altering the data. The NOAA raw data shows no warming over the past century.” The altered data are made to correlate with the increase of atmospheric CO2, conveniently supporting the main hypothesis of a “greenhouse effect” in which temperatures increase along with the greater volume of CO2 in the atmosphere––a hypothesis dating back to 1896. Additionally, missing weather station raw data––42% of stations in 2016––have been replaced by fabricated data.

Warmists, of course, like most cultists have a whole repertoire of very unscientific tactics for swatting away these inconvenient truths. They use the ad hominem and genetic fallacies to demonize critics, accusing them of being stooges of the oil companies or flat-earth kooks, even as they ignore the warmists who have received billions in government grants and green-energy subsidies, and who like Al Gore indulge in end-of-times scenarios–– “Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” he told Fox News––redolent of Millerism and other eschatological melodramas. And of course, it’s okay for Al Gore to make millions of dollars off such subsidies and “renewable energy” investments. Not to mention celebrity status and perhaps political capital; he’s being touted as a presidential contender in 2020, the environmental knight who will slay the “denier” dragon Trump who besmirched our national reputation and endangered the planet by withdrawing the U.S. from the preposterous Paris Climate Accord. And let’s not forget global-warming “scientists” themselves, who over the years have reaped billions of federal dollars, with $22 billion of taxpayer money slated just for 2017. At least oil companies spend their own money.

Then there’s the argument from authority, especially the modern willingness to reflexively credit with objective wisdom anyone calling himself a “scientist,” and to be hypnotized by the seeming self-evident truth of quantitative data. Most revealing, however, is the incessant claim that since “97% of scientists” believe in AGW, there is a “scientific consensus” that AGW is a scientific fact rather than a hypothesis compromised by our lack of enough scientific knowledge about how global climate functions over space and time. But the “97%” canard has been repeatedly exposed as an artifact created by unscientific polling. Thousands of respected and credentialed scientists question the central hypothesis and predictions of those endorsing AGW.

As for quantitative data, don’t forget that most pseudoscience is replete with copious numbers and formulas, from alchemy, phrenology, craniometry, and astrology to eugenics and “scientific racism” with its carefully quantified crania sizes and skewed IQ tests. Early 20th century eugenics also was considered a scientific fact acknowledged by a “consensus” of “scientists,” and was endorsed by professors at America’s elite universities, one of whom went on to become president. As respected progressive sociologist Edward A. Ross wrote in 1937, the endorsement of eugenics was “a perfect index of one’s breadth of outlook and unselfish concern for the future of our race.” Only religious nuts and the uneducated questioned a theory backed by the work of Charles Darwin. We know what that “consensus” led to––forced sterilization, “scientific” justifications for racial segregation, restrictions on immigration based on race and ethnicity, and ultimately the crematoria of Auschwitz.

Real science, of course, seldom leads to a “consensus,” and thinking it does can lead to unforeseen consequences. For example, after decades of being told that the “scientific consensus” on nutrition was that fat and cholesterol led to heart disease, now we are hearing “never mind.” Unfortunately, the avoidance of dietary fat led to a shift to carbohydrates, which in turn contributed to today’s obesity epidemic. Likewise, following the warmist’s prescriptions to outlaw carbon, our most efficient and cheapest energy source, will stunt economic growth in the developing world, leaving billions of people in disease and poverty; and will increase energy poverty in the U.S. and prevent job growth, all to achieve a meaningless reduction in the temperatures projected by computer models.

Skepticism, not consensus, is the hallmark of science. As Karl Popper said, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.” The warmists reveal their political and ideological interests when they demonize opponents, insist on “settled science” to stifle debate, unleash state Attorneys General to hound researches and corporations, sue critics for defamation, and do anything in their power to stop “sever attempts to refute” the AGW hypothesis.

The Al Gore show is a progressive revival-tent meeting, an excuse for intrusive big government and crony-socialist rent-seeking. The fact is, from its beginning global warming has been a political, not a scientific movement. Rupert Darwall has documented the growth of the global warming fad as a political movement. As he wrote in 2015 before the Paris Climate Accord signed by President Obama,

Global warming is preeminently a political project. On Tuesday, the leaders of France and Germany met to set a goal for the December climate summit in Paris: to fully decarbonize the world economy by the end of the century. It required, Angela Merkel and François Hollande declared, “a profound transformation of the world economy and society.” The role of experts is to provide a scientific consensus to support the drumbeat of alarm. When the president of America declares climate change an immediate threat to national security and accuses skeptics of “negligence” and “dereliction of duty,” scientific skepticism becomes an enemy of the state. The shrillness of the president’s rhetoric draws attention to the weakness of the science. The true believers have given up trying to win over the undecided.

That sums up the problem. The solution is to start practicing real science again, take the big thumb of the federal government and its deep pockets off the scales of the debate, and base energy policy on science and what is best for the American people, rather than on what serves the pecuniary interests of researchers, progressive politicians, and countries like China, and that gratifies the weird combination of stale nature-love and two-bit Marxist clichés about the evils of industrialism that passes for science among the bicoastal elites.

SOURCE



                                                   

Biofuel justifications are illusory

It’s time to really cut, cut, cut ethanol and other renewable fuel mandates – maybe to zero

Paul Driessen

The closest thing to earthly eternal life, President Ronald Reagan used to say, is a government program.

Those who benefit from a program actively and vocally defend it, often giving millions in campaign cash to politicians who help perpetuate it, while those who oppose the program or are harmed by it are usually disorganized and distracted by daily life. Legislative inertia and obstruction of the kind so graphically on display in the Senate over the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) also help to perpetuate program life.

The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), created under the 2005 Energy Policy Act and expanded by the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, is a perfect example. It has more lives than Freddy Krueger.

The laws require that refiners blend steadily increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline, and expect the private sector to produce growing amounts of “cellulosic” biofuel, “biomass-based diesel” and “advanced” biofuels. Except for corn ethanol, the production expectations have mostly turned out to be fantasies. The justifications for renewable fuels were scary exaggerations then, and are now illusions.

Let’s begin with claims made to justify this RFS extravaganza in the first place. It would reduce pollution, we were told. But cars are already 95% cleaner than their 1970 predecessors, so there are no real benefits.

The USA was depleting its petroleum reserves, and the RFS would reduce oil imports from unstable, unfriendly nations. But the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution has given the United States at least a century of new reserves. America now exports more oil and refined products than it imports, and US foreign oil consumption is now the lowest since 1970.

Renewable fuels would help prevent dangerous manmade climate change, we were also told. This assumes climate is driven by manmade carbon dioxide – and not by changes in solar heat output, cosmic rays, ocean currents and other powerful natural forces that brought ice ages, little ice ages, warm periods, droughts and floods. It assumes biofuels don’t emit CO2, or at least not as much as gasoline; in reality, over their full life cycle, they emit at least as much, if not more, of this plant-fertilizing molecule.

Moreover, contrary to the hysteria, computer models and Al Gore’s new movie, humanity and planet are not experiencing unusual or unprecedented climate or weather. Inconvenient to Mr. Gore’s theme, in fact not a single category 3-5 hurricane has struck the US mainland since October 2005, a record 11 years, 9 months. He simply presents a seemingly endless stream of weather calamities – what Australian science writer Jo Nova aptly refers to as “primal weather porn” and suggests that these events are unprecedented and caused by humans. The claim reflects deliberate distortion of the truth, abysmal grasp of science (by a man who received a C and a D in his only two college science courses), or both.

To get far more complete, factual, honest climate science, see the Climate Hustle documentary instead.

Moreover, with China, India, the rest of Asia, Africa, Poland and even Germany burning more and more coal – and more gasoline and natural gas – total atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise. But meanwhile, Greenland just had the coldest July temperature ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, and global average temperatures are back to the 1998-2017 hiatus they had before the 2015-16 El Niño.

Regardless, the immortal RFS is still with us. However, the Environmental Protection Agency has issued a previously unheard of proposal: to reduce the RFS total target for 2018 below its 2017 level. It’s a tiny 0.2% reduction, and EPA is not planning to roll back the 15-billion-gallon obligation for “conventional” biofuel, mostly ethanol from corn. But it suggests that a little healthy realism may finally be taking root.

The reduction is for cellulosic biofuel. The federal statutory target is 4.25 billion gallons in 2018. (Set a target, it will become reality, is the mindset.) EPA proposes to reduce the regulatory target to 24 million gallons for 2018, down from 31 million for 2017. But actual production and use of this fuel in 2015 was a meager 2.2 million gallons. This minuscule reduction is a good first step, but far greater reductions in statutory and regulatory targets are realistic and needed, along with a full overhaul of the RFS program.

A little over 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol were produced in 2016 – but only 143 billion gallons of gasoline were sold. That means using all the ethanol would require blends above 10% (E10 gasoline) – which is why Big Ethanol is lobbying hard for government mandates (or at least permission) for more E15 (15% ethanol) gasoline blends and pumps. Refiners refer to the current situation as the “blend wall.”

But E15 damages engines and fuel systems in older cars and motorcycles, as well as small engines for boats and garden equipment, and using E15 voids their warranties. You can already find E15 pumps, but finding zero-ethanol, pure-gasoline pumps is a tall order. Moreover, to produce ethanol, the United States is already devoting 40% of its corn crop, grown on nearly 40 million acres – along with billions of gallons of water to irrigate corn fields, plus huge amounts of fertilizer, pesticides and fossil fuels.

Much of the leftover “mash” from ethanol distillation is sold as animal feed. However, the RFS program still enriches a relatively few corn farmers, while raising costs for beef, pork, poultry and fish farmers, and for poor, minority, working class and African families. Ethanol also gets a third less mileage per gallon than gasoline, so cars cannot go as far on a tank of E10 and go even shorter distances with E15.

Ethanol sales also involve the complexities – and sometimes fraudulent practices – of buying and selling Renewable Identification Numbers, or RINs: certificates and credits for ethanol. Large integrated oil companies blend more gasoline than they refine, so they collect more RINs than they need, allowing them to hoard RINs and drive up the prices they charge to independent refiners that must buy these RINs to comply with the law. Large retail businesses like Cumberland Farms, Sheetz, Wawa and Walmart blend fuel and collect RINs, but have no RFS obligation; they use RINs as subsidies and their large volumes to command lower prices from refiners, and thereby gain an unfair advantage over small gas station owners.

The net result is that small mom-and-pop gas stations are squeezed hard and often driven out of business. Small refiners, and those on the East Coast that don’t have large wholesale and retail businesses are forced to buy pricey RINs from integrated oil company competitors, which puts those smaller outfits at a disadvantage and threatens their ability to stay in business. That means steel and refinery jobs and employee benefits are at risk. All told, the RFS presents a lot of problems for illusory benefits.

All these hard realities almost persuaded the US Senate Environment Committee to vote on a recent bill that would have revised some of the outdated and outlandish RFS mandates. It didn’t happen, but the political machinations suggest that even some progressive Democrats are beginning to question the RFS.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are becoming increasingly popular in some states and countries. To cite the perspective of “progressive ethicists” like Peter Singer, perhaps it’s time to apply the same principles to government programs that have outlived their usefulness or should never have been born.

At the very least, politically spawned, politically correct energy programs – founded on questionable, exaggerated or fabricated climate, environmental, consumer or security scares – should no longer get free passes on land use, habitat and wildlife impacts, environmental quality or consumer and employment issues. They need to be subjected to the same tough legislative, regulatory, activist and judicial assessments that we insist on for oil, gas, coal and nuclear programs

This should apply to wind and solar, electric vehicle and battery proposals, as well as to Renewable Fuel Standards. It would restore some much-needed integrity and accountability to our government.

(The opportunity for signing up to present oral testimony at EPA’s August 1 public hearing on the 2018 biofuel standards has passed. However, written statements and supporting information submitted to EPA by August 31 will be given the same weight as comments and materials presented at the hearing.)

Via email




California mountain highway is finally cleared of snow after FOUR MONTHS of snowplowing

Global cooling!

A California highway was finally cleared of snow, opening to the public in its latest date on record. Cars were once more able to drive on Highway 89, which runs through Lassen Volcanic National Park, for the first time since last fall.

The 30-mile road, also known as Lassen National Park Highway, had crews clearing the snow for nearly four months ahead of Thursday's opening.

According to park logs, the latest opening in the last 40 years was in 1995 when the highway opened on July 21.

'This year's opening of the highway will be the latest in park records dating back to 1931,' Lassen Superintendent Jim Richardson said.

However, although the highway is open, the snow hasn't completely disappeared. Many park trails will continue to be covered in snow through mid-August.

'There's 10 feet of snow still on the perimeter of the parking area,' Lassen spokeswoman Karen Haner said.

Road-clearing work began on April 4 with help from the California Department of Transportation, reported the Redding Record Searchlight.

Haner said earlier this month that snowfall in the park was about average for the winter season but more than during the drought the previous four years.

A total of 28 feet of snow was reported over the winter at the summit of the park highway.

Plowing the snow was completed just in time for Sunday's Reach the Peak, a 'hikathon' that raises funds for the Lassen Park Foundation. Hikers will start up Lassen Peak at 8am, leaving in groups every 30 minutes.

On Friday, the park's North Summit Lake, Butte Lake and Juniper Lake campgrounds opened although some Juniper Lake spots may be too muddy for campers, park officials said.

However, Lassen Highway is not the only traditionally late-opening park road.

Tioga Road, which enters Yosemite National Park in Lee Vining, California, opened on June 29, also its latest opening since 1995, according to the National Park Service.

Despite a peak of higher than 10,400 feet, the park is most famous numerous acidic hot springs.

Between 1914 and 1917, Lassen Peak experienced a series of volcanic eruptions. One in May 1915 rained ash as far as 200 miles away, the last to occur until Washington's Mount St Helens erupted in 1980.

SOURCE

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Climate “Scientists” in Panic: Real Debate and Fact Checking Will Expose “Consensus” Fraud

Scott Pruitt and Steven Koonin have climate scientist-activists and their media promoters ranting and sputtering in an epic meltdown. Pruitt is, of course, President Trump’s outspoken administrator in charge of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Koonin, a physicist and professor at New York University, was undersecretary of the Energy Department in the Obama administration. Pruitt and Koonin, along with Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and an impressive lineup of distinguished scientists have stirred the proverbial hornets’ nest by proposing (of all things!) — a scientific debate. Climate alarmists say this is “dangerous,” even “un-American.” And why does the thought of debate stir such ire, angst, and venom in supposedly dispassionate, objective, “scientific” circles? After all, isn’t that what science is all about: testing, challenging, reviewing? Apparently not — at least not when “climate science” is involved. No less a science authority than Al Gore has assured us that when it comes to anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, AGW, “the science is settled.”

However, the science is far from settled, as the alarmist choir well knows, though is loath to admit. Despite thousands of stories in the print and broadcast media declaring that “97 percent of climate scientists” endorse the idea that global warming is a dire threat and man is causing it, that fraudulent claim has been crumbling rapidly. And the alarmists fear if they lose their most cherished “consensus” weapon in an open debate, their already far-advanced radical agenda will be dealt a possibly fatal set-back. President Trump has already canceled President Obama’s unconstitutional “ratification” of the UN’s Paris agreement. Now Pruitt, Koonin, and others are calling for an adversarial Red Team-Blue Team audit of climate science.

Although he is not the first to come up with the idea, Dr. Koonin got the concept rolling this past April with a column for the Wall Street Journal entitled “A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science.” “Put the ‘consensus’ to a test,” he argued, “and improve public understanding, through an open, adversarial process.”

What could be wrong with that? If the evidence for manmade global warming is as “overwhelming” as the alarmists claim, and if the “scientific consensus” is so near unanimous as asserted, then they should have no trouble making their case. It should be a slam dunk for them. But it won’t be — and they know it. That’s what has the militant climateers terrified. The key word they fear in the Koonin proposal is an “open” adversarial process.

Some of the biggest guns in the climateer arsenal are shooting themselves in the collective foot, as they compete to denounce the Red Team-Blue Team plan in the harshest terms. Michael Mann, the Penn State activist-scientist notorious for the Hockey Stick fraud used in Al Gore’s flim-flam film An Inconvenient Truth, as well as in UN IPCC and U.S. government agency reports, has declared the Koonin proposal to be “un-American.” AGW militants Benjamin Santer, Naomi Oreskes, and Kerry Emanuel co-authored a Washington Post rant calling the idea “dangerous.” Others are insisting it would be redundant, wasteful, and a sellout to the fossil-fuel industry.

“They’re looking to use taxpayer funds to run a pro-fossil fuel industry disinformation campaign aimed at confusing the public and policymakers over what is potentially the greatest threat we face as a civilization,” Mann told the left-wing group ThinkProgress, a “project” of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress led by John Podesta. “It is frankly un-American,” Mann declared.

Un-American? Well, considering that the cost of the UN-brokered, Obama-approved, media-acclaimed Paris climate deal would come in at around $100 trillion over the course of this century, all for the astoundingly minuscule “accomplishment” of reducing global temperatures by 0.057 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s five-hundredths of a degree!), and considering that much of this will come from American taxpayer funds, perhaps it should be considered un-American not to challenge such outrageously profligate schemes. Especially since the alarmists, such as former UN climate chief Christina Figueres, a globalist-socialist, have boasted that their goal is nothing less than “a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” And not only an economic transformation. There is an additional, more onerous price tag: subjection of all human activity to a global, all-wise bureaucracy that will direct all aspects of our lives in a "sustainable" manner, and protect us from our own carbon footprints.

But Santer, Oreskes, Mann, and company would prefer to direct our attention away from all that. According to Michael Mann, the back-and-forth process Dr. Koonin and others are calling for is already taken care of: It’s called “peer-review.” “The system they describe is precisely what scientific peer-review is,” Mann told ThinkProgress. “The reality is that the only thing these folks don’t like is the conclusion that the scientific community (that is, the world’s scientists, literally) has arrived at — that climate change is real, human-caused, and a threat.”

Santer, Oreskes, and Emanuel sounded a similar refrain in their Post op-ed, writing that “calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.”

Peer Review or Pal Review?

The Santer-Oreskes-Emanuel trio claim that the Koonin proposal would inject ugly “tribalism” into the pure and pristine process of climate science. They argue:

The basic premise of these “Red Team/Blue Team” requests is that climate science is broken and needs to be fixed. The implicit message in the requests is that scientists belong to tribes, and key findings of climate science — such as the existence of a large human-caused warming signal — have not undergone adequate review by all tribes. This tribalism could be addressed, Koonin believes, by emulating Red Team/Blue Team assessment strategies in “intelligence assessments, spacecraft design, and major industrial operations."

They continue:

In Koonin’s view, “traditional” peer-review processes are flawed and lack transparency, and international scientific assessments do not accurately represent “the vibrant and developing science.” He implicitly accuses the climate science community of “advisory malpractice” by ignoring major sources of uncertainty. To use present-day vernacular, both Koonin and Pruitt are essentially claiming that peer-review systems are rigged, and that climate scientists are not providing sound scientific information to policymakers.

“Heresy” Causes “High Priestess” to Be “Tossed Out of the Tribe”

But, Dr. Koonin is far from the only scientist “essentially claiming that peer-review systems are rigged,” that they’ve already gone “tribal.” Ask other scientists, such as Dr. Patrick Michaels, Dr. John Bates, Dr. Chris Landsea, Dr. Benny Peiser, Professor Dennis Bray, Dr. Roy Spencer, or any of hundreds of other scientists who have seen and experienced the rigging and the tribalism up close and personal.

Ask (by all means) Dr. Judith Curry. Once considered the “high priestess of global warming,” she says she was “tossed out of the tribe” for questioning AGW dogma, as enforced by the likes of Santer, Oreskes, and Emanuel. The former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Professor Curry has a record of publication in peer-reviewed climate science journals that is second to none. For years she was a darling of the climate-industrial-academic complex. However, the “Climategate” e-mail scandal at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Center (UEA-CRU) caused her to look more deeply into what had obviously become a blatantly corrupt, politically driven “scientific” system.

The British paper, The Spectator, wrote of her, in a 2015 article:

Curry’s independence has cost her dear. She began to be reviled after the 2009 "Climategate" scandal, when leaked emails revealed that some scientists were fighting to suppress sceptical views. "I started saying that scientists should be more accountable, and I began to engage with sceptic bloggers. I thought that would calm the waters. Instead I was tossed out of the tribe. There’s no way I would have done this if I hadn’t been a tenured professor, fairly near the end of my career. If I were seeking a new job in the US academy, I’d be pretty much unemployable. I can still publish in the peer-reviewed journals. But there’s no way I could get a government research grant to do the research I want to do. Since then, I’ve stopped judging my career by these metrics. I’m doing what I do to stand up for science and to do the right thing."

Michael Mann called Judith Curry “anti-science,” but, considering the source, she is undaunted by insult. “It’s unfortunate, but he calls anyone who doesn’t agree with him a denier,” she told the Spectator.

The UEA-CRU e-mails include infamous exchanges involving Phil Jones, Michael Mann, and other leading lights of the AGW establishment conspiring on how to keep skeptical scientists from getting published in scientific journals, as well as scheming on how to get editors fired who refused to censor dissident scientists. UEA-CRU chief Phil Jones, for instance, discussed suppressing scientific articles he did not like: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

The “Kevin” whom Jones refers to is Dr. Kevin Trenberth, one of the vicious pseudo-scientists who signed a letter to President Obama, calling on him to prosecute and imprison climate skeptics whom they label as “deniers.” Trenberth is one of the “consensus enforcers” Dr. Curry calls out in a recent entry on her blog, “Climate Etc.”

Curry remarks that, in a recent congressional hearing, climate zealot Senator Al Franken repeatedly asked Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke if he could “tell me how much warming government scientists predict for the end of this century under a business-as-usual scenario?”  Zinke stated: “I don’t think government scientists can predict with certainty.” “There isn’t a model that exists today that can predict today’s weather given all the data,” Zinke said.

Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, jumped into the fray, calling Zinke’s explanation “a stupid and ignorant answer.” Trenberth’s insulting comment was given widespread favorable media coverage, naturally, as a supposed smack-down of dim-witted “deniers” by a reputed authoritative voice of science.

But Curry smacks down the smug would-be smacker, observing: “Zinke’s statement is true.  Trenberth is a scientific bully/thug for calling Zinke’s answer stupid and ignorant, especially when both Trenberth and [NASA’s Gavin] Schmidt basically admit that the models can’t predict the future.”

Trenberth has plenty of company in the lavishly funded billion-dollar-a-day bully/thug climate-industrial complex. Perpetual activist Ben “the Ranter” Santer returned to the pages of the Washington Post on July 5 for an orgy of self-indulgent virtue signaling about his decades of sacrificial slaving in the service of science and humanity. “I’m a climate scientist. And I’m not letting trickle-down ignorance win,” Santer declared in the title of his WaPo diatribe, which also served as his pledge to “fight the Trump administration’s darkness.”

But what about his own darkness? Recently, as we have reported, Santer and some of his fellow climate cabal members have been forced by reality to admit that the vaunted computer climate models they have been relying on for decades (and that they have demanded all humanity bow before) have consistently overestimated climate sensitivity and global temperatures. But as we noted, Santer et al. couldn’t quite come clean; they couched their admission in a tortured concatenation of excuses and rationalizations designed to hide the fact that their “science” was based (at best) on mere conjecture from garbage in-garbage out computer folderol, and/or (at worst) outright criminal fraud.

When it comes to brazen fraud, Santer’s co-author Professor Naomi Oreskes is a tough one to beat. Together with Australian alarmist John Cook, Oreskes, the Harvard “historian of science,” is responsible for perpetrating the “97 percent” lie, the biggest scam backing up the most colossal hoax in history. Replicating Oreskes’ original 2004 study, Dr. Benny Peiser found only 1 percent of published scientific papers explicitly endorse the “consensus view” that anthropogenic sources are responsible for global warming. And that was after Oreskes had used a deceptive selection process to winnow out thousands of studies. So, the false consensus was/is not 97 percent, but less than 1 percent! Likewise, John Cook’s study has been thoroughly eviscerated, revealing an AGW consensus of around 0.5 percent — one-half of a percent, not 97 percent. Obviously, Dr. Koonin’s proposal for a Red Team-Blue Team exercise, with an honest, open debate would threaten to expose this carefully constructed “overwhelming scientific consensus” lie that remains the biggest linchpin of the catastrophic AGW theory. That is why we are seeing such desperate efforts to derail it.

SOURCE





Not so hot: Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Sequel’ meets with skepticism even from left

Nobody is more excited about Friday’s release of Al Gore’s sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth” than climate skeptic Marc Morano, which comes as an ill wind for the movement to stop global warming, not to mention Mr. Gore.

For months, Mr. Morano and his team have tracked the Democrat at advance screenings of “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” ambushing him with stunts such as asking him about his prediction that without drastic measures, the planet would reach a “point of no return” in a decade.

The former vice president made that claim 11 years ago in “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Oscar-winning documentary whose warnings of climate doom propelled Mr. Gore to the forefront of the movement against global warming — while turning him into something of a punchline.

“Al Gore is the gift that keeps on giving,” said Mr. Morano, who runs the skeptical Climate Depot website, a project of the free-market Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

Even the left has its doubts about whether the sequel will do more harm than good by reinforcing Mr. Gore’s status as the face of the movement to protect the climate.

The liberal New Republic aired those concerns in a Monday article headlined “The Troubling Return of Al Gore,” which said that “not everyone on the left is celebrating Gore’s reemergence” and described him as “the most polarizing figure in climate politics.”

“Having a highly partisan spokesman who instantly divides the public between support and opposition is doing the climate campaigners no favors,” said Mr. Morano. “Gore turns off half the audience before the film even starts, just by virtue of him being a divisive player in American politics.”

Already, the sides have lined up: California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, attended a Wednesday screening with Mr. Gore in Hollywood, but no congressional Republicans turned up for a free Tuesday showing on Capitol Hill, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“I’m not sure Mr. Gore will re-energize either side. In my opinion, he’s become largely irrelevant in the climate debate, mainly due to the multitude of failed claims and factual errors in his statements over the years,” said Anthony Watts, who runs the widely viewed skeptics website Watts Up With That.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Gore came under fire by comparing climate change to slavery abolition, saying both movements were “met with ferocious resistance.”

“He’s clearly mostly about propaganda, and both sides of the climate debate now recognize this,” Mr. Watts said.

With “An Inconvenient Sequel,” Mr. Gore said his aim is to drum up grass-roots support for climate activism.

“We need to get more people involved,” he told The Associated Press. “That’s one of the real purposes of this movie: to tell people what they need to know, to show them that there is hope and there are solutions now, and inspire them to get involved.”

The film has drawn celebrity backing, earning kudos on Twitter from ecowarriors such as actor Leonardo DiCaprio and singer Jason Mraz. Mr. Gore has promoted the film on late-night shows hosted by Stephen Colbert and James Corden.

After showings at the Sundance Film Festival and Cannes Film Festival, the film is slated for limited release Friday and wide release Aug. 4.

So far, reviews have been mixed. While the original film focused on the climate change issue, the sequel spends more time on Mr. Gore’s story, prompting some critics to praise the movie for being more engaging than the first even as others have called it a “vanity project” and a “victory lap.”

The timing of the film is both prescient and problematic. Alarm over President Trump’s skepticism about climate change prompted The Wrap’s Elizabeth Weitzman to declare that “we need [Mr. Gore‘s] voice more than ever.”

At the same time, the filmmakers miscalculated by initially ending with the success of the Paris agreement, which fell apart after Mr. Trump announced June 1 that he would pull out of the accord.

The film and its trailer have since been updated with an anti-Trump message. Still, some reviewers have complained that the tacked-on ending muddles the documentary’s final stretch showing Mr. Gore working to bring India on board at the 2015 Paris summit.

The sequel’s “whole inspirational framework seems shaped around the realities of a pre-November 9 world, to the point where its outlook now seems sadly outdated, what with a powerful new enemy to the cause threatening to undo all the progress Gore has made and the film celebrates,” film critic A.A. Dowd said on the A.V. Club website. “Talk about an inconvenient truth.”

Another problem is that Mr. Gore is no longer on the cutting edge of the climate movement. Up-and-comers such as the Copenhagen Consensus Center’s Bjorn Lomborg have called for making green energy cheaper by increasing funding for research instead of entering into sweeping global treaties like the kind Mr. Gore favors.

Mr. Lomborg said the Paris agreement is likely to fail just as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol did by focusing on government subsidies for “inefficient solar and wind and Teslas that feel good but actually don’t do much.”

“Yes, we’ll go see another Al Gore movie, and honestly it’s not going to move us anyplace because he’s basically still trying to scare us witless using a solution that hasn’t worked for the last 20 years and is likely not to work the next 20,” Mr. Lomborg said.

Repeating the impact of “An Inconvenient Truth” would be difficult under the best of circumstances. The film, which earned nearly $50 million at the box office, gave Mr. Gore an unexpected second act in public life after his nearly victorious 2000 presidential run. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He launched the Climate Reality Project. He also became rich, amassing a net worth estimated at as much as $300 million, including renewable energy investments as co-founder of Generation Investment Management.

At the same time, Mr. Gore faces accusations of climate hypocrisy every time he climbs into an SUV or hops onto a private plane. He took heat for years over the lighting bill on his mansion in Nashville, Tennessee.

Despite the Trump win, Mr. Gore says the climate message is taking root with Americans. A Gallup poll in March found that 45 percent of those surveyed worry about global warming “a great deal,” up from 37 percent a year earlier.

“People are seeing through this now. Two-thirds of the American people want to solve this, big time,” Mr. Gore said.

Then again, a Bloomberg poll this month found that only 10 percent saw global warming as the most important issue facing the country. A Chapman University poll released in October found that those surveyed were more afraid of clowns than global warming.

“Anyone predicting Gore’s sequel will even come close to his 2006 original,” said Mr. Morano, “will be joining a long list of failed climate predictions and climate models.”

SOURCE





NASA Confirms Falling Sea Levels For Two Years Amidst Media Blackout

Most media outlets cannot be bothered to report something that dramatically deflates their narrative. So it goes without saying that when NASA confirmed that ocean levels have actually been falling for the past few years, the media would be more than silent.

As the global warming narrative quickly unravels, and leftists scramble to throw accusations at those who dare question the false data, the media brushes facts under the rug. Amidst revelations of scientific fraud, data alteration and faked “hockey stick” data models, the fake news media remains suspiciously silent over the fact that NASA now confirms ocean levels have been falling for nearly two years.

On a NASA page intended to spread climate alarmism (https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/), NASA’s own data reveal that worldwide ocean levels have been falling for nearly two years, dropping from a variation of roughly 87.5mm to below 85mm.

This data clearly contradicts the false narrative of rapid, never-ending rising ocean levels that flood continents and drown cities. The narrative is climate alarmists key element of the climate change fear mongering fiction that’s used to scare gullible youth into making Al Gore rich.

Global warming alarmists might say this is only a “pause” in the rising ocean levels, and that the long-term trend is clearly in the direction of rising oceans. However, these people wildly exaggerate the degree of ocean level increases to the point of absurdity and have been caught red-handed completely fabricating data to continue scaring the public into supporting a non-issue.

Even in a worse case scenario, sea levels will rise only about a foot over the next 100 years. That amount is far short of what climate alarmists would need to create an apocalyptic event based solely on the weather.  Looking at current events right now, we’d say that Armageddon would more likely be created by a world war or a global economic collapse.

Even a warmer planet would be more hospitable to plants. But again, warmth as a benefit for plant life is not something climate alarmists want to hear. They need their backsides patted by the same lies.

SOURCE





The Rise of Green Fascism: BioEngineering Humans Could Solve Climate Change

This guy would seem to get his ethics from Mao Tse Tung

People unwilling to act on the climate-crisis narrative should be assisted with drugs that improve and promote conformity, according to eminent bio-ethicist Professor Matthew Liao, of New York University, who also wants to see parents dosing their children with hormones and diets to keep them shorter and less of a burden on the planet.

He wants such people to be given  the ‘love drug/cuddle chemical’ oxytocin. This would increase their trust and empathy and make them more ready to change to emission-saving lifestyles.

As his peer-reviewed study puts it, “Pharmacologically induced altruism and empathy could increase the likelihood that we adopt the necessary behavioral and market solutions for curbing climate change.” He emphasises there would be no coercion. The drugs would merely help those who want to be climate-friendly behaviour but lack the willpower

Once sufficiently drugged, parents would be less likely to reject notions of “human engineering” techniques that will be needed to create Humans 2.0. These amended species will be 15cm shorter than now, hence more energy efficient and less resource-demanding. His study,  Human Engineering and Climate Change, is in  Ethics, Policy and the Environment.[1]

Some US reaction to Liao has been adverse. Investor’s  Business Daily used the headline, “Global Warming Fever Drove This Professor Completely Mad”.[2] It said that warmists are “bummed they can’t find enough naive people to buy into their story”. The looniest tune yet played is Liao’s, it said.

Liao’s study theorises that shorter humans could be achieved through embryo selection during IVF, plus drug and nutrient treatments to reduce birth weights. (High birth weight correlates with future height; low weights obviously correlate with risk to the baby).[3]  Anti-growth hormones could be fed to toddlers by climate-caring parents to create earlier closing of their bubs’ epiphyseal (growth) plates. Oh, and he also wants ecocidal meat eaters bio-altered to induce unpleasant reactions if they put pleasure ahead of planet and tuck into a T-bone.[4]

His paper, although now five years old and sometimes mistaken for a sceptic hoax, features today on his personal website. It merited him a gig at a recent Leftist-stacked Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney Opera House, where he spoke  in front of  a banner, “Engineering humans to stop climate change”. His compere was the respectful Simon Longstaff, boss of Sydney’s  Ethics Centre , who introduced his guest as a “really great speaker…He is on the up, this guy. He is on the up!”

Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Moral Philosophy, Liao is chair of bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at New York University’s philosophy department — ranked world No 1 for philosophy, Longstaff said. Liao was earlier deputy director in the Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences in the philosophy faculty at Oxford University. Longstaff said it was ranked world No 2. The mind boggles at what must go on those university philosophy/bioethics units ranked from third to 100?

Liao began his Opera House talk with a visiting speaker’s typical home-town warm-up, in this instance about Sydney being such a beautiful city. After that, warming to his topic, he fretted that the city “might go underwater” because of rising seas.

Many environmental problems, such as climate change, need collective action, he continued, but humans remain stubbornly individualistic, which is why drugs that increase empathy and altruism might bestow the benefits of societal cooperation and engagement. Test subjects given oxytocin hormones were more willing to share money with strangers, behave in more trustworthy ways, and better read other people’s emotions, he said.

He continued,  “Making children smaller may be unappealing, but so is the prospect of having our children grow up in a world blighted by the environmental consequences of our choices and lifestyles…

“To combat climate change we can either change the environment or change ourselves.  Given the enormous risks associated  with changing the environment, we should take  seriously that we need to change ourselves.”

SOURCE





Australia: Prof Peter Ridd: the Great Barrier Reef recovers, our science institutions are failing us, science needs to be checked

Who is Peter Ridd? Some context first:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Background:

When marine scientist Peter Ridd suspected something was wrong with photographs being used to highlight the rapid decline of the Great Barrier Reef, he did what good scientists are supposed to do: he sent a team to check the facts.

After attempting to blow the whistle on what he found — healthy corals — Professor Ridd was censured by James Cook University and threatened with the sack. After a formal investigation, Professor Ridd — a renowned campaigner for quality assurance over coral research from JCU’s Marine Geophysics Laboratory — was found guilty of “failing to act in a collegial way and in the academic spirit of the institution”.

His crime was to encourage questioning of two of the nation’s leading reef institutions, the Centre of Excellence for Coral Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, on whether they knew that photographs they had published and claimed to show long-term collapse of reef health could be misleading and wrong.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Alan Jones, interviews Peter Ridd,  James Cook university professor of physics about the state of the Great Barrier Reef

The coral reef recovers.

Peter Ridd: Coral Reefs recover — “the scientists make hay when it dies in a spectacular way but they are quiet when it recovers.”

On symbionts — “There is a large variety of symbionts and some allow coral to grow faster but are more sensitive to bleaching.”

All the corals on the Great Barrier Reef live and grow much faster in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Thailand where the water is much hotter than it is on the reef and the corals just juggle these symbionts.

Corals have a little thermometer built in them, when you take a core of them from many years ago we know what the temperature of the water was back when Captain Cook sailed up the coast, it was actually about the same temperature then. It was colder 100 years ago, but it has recovered from that. The temperatures on the reef are not even significantly warmer than average on a hundred year timescale.

Corals that bleach in one year will be less susceptible to bleaching in following years.

On the failure of modern science:

Peter Ridd: We can no longer rely on our science institutions. This is a very sad thing.

We are like a ship upon the ocean when our science fails and we need to do something about it. … This science is almost never checked.

Alan Jones: All these things [bleaching, crown of thorns] have been around for millennia, I love this line, as you write “long before scientists got hold of any scuba gear.”

Peter Ridd: These things only became a problem when scientists pop up on the scene.

Scientists are trying to close down, or affect adversely the sugar cane, the cattle, and the coal industry, and they are also telling the world the reef is dead which affects the tourist industry in Queensland.

Like a bushfire… It [bleaching] looks terrible when it happens but it grows back.

On the future:

Peter Ridd: There needs to be a properly funded group of scientists who sole job is to find fault in the science with which we are basing expensive public policy decisions ….

SOURCE

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

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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The truth about Greenland

We have all heard about the record-breaking ice mass balance and cold temperature reading of -33°C recently set in Greenland — the Arctic island that is supposedly the canary in the climate coal mine.

It turns out that things up there are colder than we may be led to believe and that the alleged warming there is fiction.

The Swiss online Baseler Zeitung (BAZ) here reports: “In Greenland July this year has been the coldest ever. That has left climate catastrophists struggling to explain it.”

Citing the Danish Meteorological Institute, the BAZ comments that the -33°C reading earlier this month was “the coldest July temperature ever recorded in the northern hemisphere“, smashing the previous record of 30.7°C.

The BAZ adds that also the “ice cover has grown strongly over almost all of Greenland“.

But this has been ignored, as the Switzerland-based daily also bravely writes that “most journalists and media leaders are active or passive members of the green-socialist Climate Church and the new religion of the post-Christian western world” and acknowledge only things that fit their world narrative. This likely explains why there’s been no word about the record cold in Greenland. Why? The BAZ comments:

It casts the central prophesy of a continuous and ultimately lethal global warming, for which we are ourselves to blame, into question.”

Recently NTZ reported here that Greenland in fact has been cooling over the past decade, as three recent studies alarmingly show us. According to one published in May of this year by a team of researchers led by Takuro Kobashi of the University of Bern, mean annual temperatures at the summit of Greenland have been showing “a slightly decreasing trend in accordance with northern North Atlantic-wide cooling“. See chart below.


Greenland’s temperatures headed in the wrong direction, defying climate model projections. Underlying chart source: Kobashi et al., 2017.

Warm optimum near an end?

The team by Kobashi also show that the Greenland Summit temperature have not risen in 90 years, and that Greenland was far warmer earlier in the Holocene:

One has to wonder if the current optimum may be nearing an end. History shows that the earth’s surface temperature is in fact highly unstable and that most optimums don’t last much beyond 10,000 years. We need to ask ourselves what could be done to avert the catastrophe that a new ice age would bring with it. The overall trend does not bode well.

SOURCE





UK: Diesel and petrol car ban: Plan for 2040 unravels as 10 new power stations needed to cope with electric revolution

Electric cars are not as green as you might think

Plans to ban the sale of new diesel and petrol cars by 2040 in a bid to encourage people to buy electric vehicles are a "tall order" and will place unprecedented strain on the National Grid, motoring experts have warned.

Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, has warned that Britain "can't carry on" with petrol and diesel cars because of the damage that they are doing to people's health and the planet. "There is no alternative to embracing new technology," he said.

However the AA warned that the National Grid would be under pressure to "cope with a mass switch-on after the evening rush hour", while Which? Car magazine warned that electric cars are currently more expensive and less practical.

According to a National Grid report, peak demand for electricity could add around 30 gigawatts to the current peak of 61GW - an increase of 50 per cent.

The Government is unveiling plans to reduce diesel emissions
The Government is ushering in the end of the traditional car
The extra electricity needed will be the equivalent of almost 10 times the total power output of the new Hinckley Point C nuclear power station being built in Somerset.

National Grid predicts Britain will become increasingly reliant on imported electricity, which will rise from around 10 per cent of total electricity to around one third, raising questions about energy security.

Just 4 per cent of new car sales are for electric vehicles, and concerns have also been raised about whether Britain will have enough charging points for the new generation of cars.

Diesel drivers on congested roads in towns and cities across the UK face new pollution taxes and could also be barred from travelling at rush hour.

Ministers have identified 81 major roads in 17 towns and cities where urgent action is required because they are in breach of EU emissions standards, putting people's health at risk.

The air quality strategy urges local authorities to first try to reduce emissions by retrofitting the most polluting diesel vehicles, changing road layouts and removing speed humps.

However it concedes that as a last resort councils will be allowed to impose tough restrictions on the most polluting diesel vehicles as soon as 2020 to bring down the levels of harmful nitrogen dioxide emissions.

The strategy stops short of meeting the demands of motoring groups for a diesel scrappage scheme, under which diesel drivers would receive compensation for trading in their polluting vehicles.

It instead says that the Government will hold a consultation on a "possible" scrappage scheme in the autumn, which sources have suggested is likely to be "very, very targeted".

The Government will also commit to banning the sale of all new diesel and petrol cars by 2040 in a bid to encourage people to switch to electric and hybrid vehicles.

Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, is expected to warn local authorities against "unfairly penalising" drivers by imposing pollution taxes and other restrictions on diesel drivers.

Mr Gove suggested on Wednesday morning that more wind farms may be needed to meet the Government's ambition.

Asked if there was no alternative to more wind farms and nuclear power energy stations, Mr Gove told the BBC Radio 4's Today: "There is no alternative to embracing new technology."

Told the Conservatives had a manifesto promise against more wind farms, Mr Gove said: "The Conservatives had a manifesto promise to ensure by 2050 there would be no diesel or petrol vehicles on our roads."

The Government is concerned that motorists were encouraged to buy diesel vehicles under Labour more than a decade ago because of concerns at the time over carbon emissions.

Mr Gove has significantly stripped back previous plans which could have seen restrictions on diesel cars across entire city and town centres. He instead wants councils to focus on reducing emissions on specific roads.

A new analysis found that 48 of the most polluted roads are in London. Others have been identified in Birmingham, Derby, Leeds, Nottingham, Southampton, Bristol, Bolton, Manchester, Bury, Coventry, Newcastle, Sheffield, Belfast, Cardiff and Middlesborough.

The pollution hotspots are predominantly on A-roads but also include stretches of two motorways - the M4 near London and the M32 in Bristol.

The strategy will insist that any restrictions on diesel cars must be "time limited" and lifted as soon as air pollution levels fall within legal limits.

A Government spokesman said: “Our plan to deal with dirty diesels will help councils clean up emissions hotspots – often a single road - through common sense measures which do not unfairly penalise ordinary working people.

“Diesel drivers are not to blame and to help them switch to cleaner vehicles the government will consult on a targeted scrappage scheme - one of a number of measures to support motorists affected by local plans.

”Overall we are investing £3bn to tackle the effects of roadside pollution and supporting greener transport initiatives.”

The Government has been forced to come up with tougher measures to target diesel drivers after losing a case against environmental campaigners ClientEarth over breaches of EU emissions standards.

Instead of pollution taxes, councils will be urged to improve the flow of traffic with measures such as removing speed humps to prevent cars repeatedly slowing down and speeding up, which almost doubles the amount of harmful gasses they pump out.

Other options which are expected to be put forward include better sequencing of traffic lights to ensure that drivers will keep arriving at green lights rather than red ones if they drive within the speed limit.

Ministers will provide an extra £255million to help councils implement their plans, which could come into force as soon as 2020.

The number of diesel vehicles on Britain's roads has risen from 3.2 million in 2000 to more than 10 million today after the Labour Government slashed fuel duty on diesel cars in a drive to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

It has since emerged that diesel vehicles emit harmful nitrogen dioxide, which can raise the risk of strokes, heart attacks and asthma attacks.

Senior Labour figures including Sir David King, who served as Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, have since admitted that they were "wrong" to promote diesel cars.

Other proposals are expected to include "real driving emissions" vehicle tests in the wake of the Volkswagen emission scandal and encouraging the public sector to buy cleaner vehicles.

Ministers also want to crackdown on parents who leave their engine running during the school run. Councils have introduced on the spot fines of up to £80 in a bid to crackdown on the practice.

SOURCE




The Nazi Origins of Renewable Energy (and Global Warming)

Why study history, and such an ugly subject as the Nazi rise in the Weimar Republic?  Because, quoting George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  It seems we have forgotten a lot, because, as a civilization, we are repeating the mad Nazi schemes of renewable energy on a massive scale.

A good source document is this book: "Technology and Economy in Third Reich: A Program for Work" by Franz Lawaszeck, published in 1933

Dr. Franz Lawaszeck was an inventor and manufacturer of hydropower turbines in Bavaria.  As an early member of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (the National Socialist German Workers' Party or Nazi Party), he soon became a prominent spokesman about the economic policy of the party, especially energy policy.  He was clearly in the left-wing anti-capitalist part of the party and had a close relation to other leftist National Socialists such as Feder, Streicher, Himmler, Backe, Goebbels, etc.  His book starts by decrying the capitalist state and calling for the life-essential equilibrium that can exist only in a corporatist state.

Dr Lawaszeck begins discussing energy on page 10.  Big industries in a capitalist society have an advantage in that they can produce their own power on site for 1.5-2.0 pfennig/kWh, whereas small businesses pay 10-25 pfennig/kWh.

Then, on to page 12 and the hydrogen economy:

It seems that the transformation of society to a hydrogen society is an important step to a new industrial revolution.  We shall use this "vorsprung durch technik" [advantage by technology].  Hydrogen engines are more powerful than engines driven by diesel or benzene.  With the inexpensive oxygen, it will be cheaper to manufacture and weld steel.  So we could successfully compete on the world market and export more.  We can then pay back our national debt, even when we have reduced the interest to zero.

On page 47, he gets into the intended Nazi transformation of the power industry:

In short, industry's needs can be filled by hydro-wind power and coal.  Coal is wasted because it is so cheap, so long-term economic effects are not taken into consideration.  Coal would be much better utilized for making valuable chemicals and other products.  Hydro and wind power can provide up to 80% of energy.  The renewable energy is flowing and free.  Why aren't they used more?  Interest on money is the greatest obstacle for making hydro and wind profitable. As long we have interest on money, it will restrict the use of hydropower.

Then on to the hydrogen economy on page 60:

Our mission is to build the new hydro and wind power plants independent of the electrical grid, so they produce valuable storable energy in the form of hydrogen gas.  Hydrogen can easily be stored and transported in pipelines.  Hydrogen will be produced by pressure electrolysis, so the gas will be compressed without extra energy consumption.

And then more on wind power:

Wind power, using the cost-free wind, can be built on a large scale.  Improved technology will in the future make it no more expensive than thermal power.  This is technically and economically possible and opens up a quite new life-important type of power generation.  The future of wind is no longer small windmills, but very large real power plants.  The wind towers must be at least 100 m [330 ft] high, the higher the better, ideally with rotors 100 m [330 ft] in diameter.  This kind of high cage mast is already built in the shape of high radio masts.

In a sensational speech by the constructor of the biggest steel towers in Germany, the well known engineer Hermann Honnef from the Rhineland, at the Institute of Physics of the Technical University [Hochschule] in Berlin, mentioned that in the height between 70 to 90 meters [230 to 300 ft], a high wind zone is starting that can deliver wind energy.  Honnef had in yearlong research constructed a high-zone wind power project, which he declared in details.  The influence of variable wind is eliminated totally.  The most interesting result of his experiments is that it is possible to use the different strengths of wind in different areas to a degree, that only 3 to 5% in the yearly peak demand is left.  This is a huge improvement compared with the much bigger variability of hydro power.  He will combine hydro power with his wind power constructions, which are delivering the base electricity, and in this way improve the utility of hydro power considerably.

The surplus electricity from the windmills, situated along the sea coast, will be used for the production of very inexpensive hydrogen.  This will make many products less expensive.  Fertilizers will fall in price.  The hydration of coal to liquids will be cost-effective.  The cost can be reduced from 17 pfennig per litre [64 pfennig per gallon] to 7-8 pfennig per litre [26-30 pfennig per gallon].  In this way about one billion Reichsmark can be saved, which today goes abroad (for importing oil).  The 300,000 workers in the coal mining industry can keep their jobs, 200,000 in the mines and 100,000 for the liquefaction of coal.  The cost savings will make it possible that an additional 400,000 workers can be paid in the transforming process of the industry

Big and small farms shall get the possibility to purchase electricity in surplus times at very reasonable prices, from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. and 12 noon to 1 p.m.  At least 1 million new small farms shall be established. The cheap electricity makes it possible to heat the land, and then get a third harvest.  Again, billions can be saved, which we normally pay to foreign countries for vegetables, salad, fruits, etc.  During the night, electricity of about 1 kWh for 1 square meter [11 square feet] of land will be sufficient.

One of the 1,300-foot-high wind towers would have taken 27,500 tons of steel to make, approaching the amount used in the Scharnhorst.  So wiser heads prevailed, and the Nazi renewables push petered out by 1936.  But another pernicious Nazi influence was rising. Hermann Flohn, born in 1912, received his doctorate in 1934 and began work for the German Meteorological Service.  In 1941, he published the first German-language article on global warming, the title of which translates as The Activity of Man as a Climate Factor.  Also in that year, he became the chief meteorologist for the Luftwaffe High Command, providing advice for Operation Barbarossa.  Herr Flohn survived the war and was still pubishing alarmist papers on global warming 40 years later – for example, the title of this paper in the journal Umschau in 1980 Translates as "C02-Induced Warmth More Dangerous than Nuclear Energy".  These sentences tell you all you need to know from it:

Up to a value of 450 ppm, there are apparently only risks that can be countered by an adaptation strategy[.]

A really catastrophic climate can only be expected at about 750 ppm: the freezing of the Arctic ice ocean shifts the climate and precipitation belts around 600 to 800 km [375 to 500 mi] to the North Pole (less to the South Pole).

So if you have ever wondered about the intellectual origins of renewable energy and global warming, they had their beginnings during an ugly period of history – through misanthropic schemes created by people with a repulsive Weltanschauung.

SOURCE




Enemies of humanity

Mosquitoes and uncaring environmental activists perpetuate poverty, disease and death

By Steven Lyazi in Uganda                                      

After being infected again with malaria last July, I spent almost a month in a Kampala hospital. Paying for my treatment was extremely difficult, as it is for most Ugandan and African families. I was lucky I could scrape the money together. Many families cannot afford proper treatment.

Where and how can they get the money to go back to the hospital again and again, every time a family member gets malaria, when they also need food, clothes and so many other things – or malaria makes them so sick that they can’t work for weeks or even months? Many parents can do nothing except watch their loved ones die in agony, and then give them a simple burial.

Far too many people still die from malaria every year in Africa, the vast majority of them women and children. Too many more die from lung and intestinal diseases, because we don’t have electricity, natural gas, clean water, or decent modern homes, clinics and hospitals.

Malaria also makes many people so weak that they die from other diseases that people in Europe and the United States rarely even hear about, like chronic dysentery. It saps people’s strength for years and leaves them with severe liver and kidney damage. Cerebral malaria causes lifelong learning and memory problems.

All these diseases create enormous barriers to Africa’s economic growth. They drain our national healthcare budgets and deepen our poverty. Malaria control and treatment alone cost Africa over $12 billion annually. Uganda alone spends $11 million a year fighting it. The disease drains an estimated $100 billion every year from the African economy.

Malaria also hits India and other countries really hard. The World Health Organization (WHO) says it drains India’s economy of as much as $2 billion every year. Billions in wages are lost, because people die or are absent from work, have low productivity due to fatigue, and have to spend so much on bed nets, insecticides, bug repellants, medicines, treatments and hospital care.

Terrible roads mean that, even when AIDS and other drugs are shipped to African countries, few people receive them. Many sit in warehouses until their expiration date passes, and then those expired drugs get sold on the black market. People buy them, and die. Other times, they take drugs until they feel better, and then sell the rest of the prescription. Then a more deadly, resistant malaria comes back and makes them even worse.

And yet global green campaigners endlessly spend money trying to prevent Africans from using fossil fuels, promoting renewable energy and trying to sell us little solar ovens. But this great generosity does nothing to address the horrible realities of people dying now – day after day, year after year. Greens worry constantly about Africans being exposed to insecticides. We worry about dying from malaria.

We don’t need enemies of humanity. What we need is financial and political support to conquer malaria, lung diseases and intestinal parasites. We need clean water and affordable, reliable electricity in our villages and cities. We need modern hospitals.

We need environmental activists to realize how important fossil fuels and hydroelectric plants are to having decent, healthy living standards, lights, computers, the internet, clean hospitals, clean water, and everything else modern countries have.

We need them to support us Africans in preventing malaria in the first place – which means we need more than bed nets. We need campaigners to recognize that we have the same rights as people in modern, rich, industrialized countries to decent living standards and modern technology.

Malaria viruses are constantly mutating, making available treatments less effective. Many families cannot afford the drugs, and many of the drugs are fake, just packaged to look like the real thing. People spend money on them, they don’t help at all, and people die.

The WHO says over 3 billion people around the world are still at risk of getting malaria. In 2015, there were 212 million cases of malaria and 438,000 people died, the vast majority of them in Africa.

Many of these illnesses and deaths could be prevented if just a few simple steps were taken right now, especially by allowing and encouraging countries to use preventive measures that work, like DDT.

So many people have access to medical care only on an irregular basis. Others have never learned how to take proper care of themselves or their children. But the most fundamental problem is malaria-carrying mosquitoes that are the source of our biggest scourge. And there is a readily available life-saving solution – DDT and other pesticides to kill mosquitoes and keep them out of our homes.

To me, there is simply no substitute for DDT. It is the most affordable, longest lasting, most effective mosquito repellant in existence. Sprayed in tiny amounts on the walls of traditional homes, just once or twice a year, DDT repels mosquitoes from the entire house, kills any that land on walls, and perplexes or irritates any that are not killed or repelled, so their urge to bite is gone.

Other pesticides that some activists say we can use are not as appropriate, or they are up to six times more expensive than DDT, or they have to be sprayed much more often. Every dollar spent this way is a dollar that’s unavailable for safe drinking water, electricity and other critical needs.

DDT for indoor residual spraying programs is rejected because it is supposedly dangerous to the environment and might be detected in our blood or on agricultural products. We use it carefully, it is less dangerous than other pesticides, and being able to detect it does not mean it is a risk to anyone. No one has ever died from it, and it can help prevent malaria and other diseases that ruin our lives and kill us.

Where DDT is used in the developing world, malaria cases and deaths often drop by 80% or more. Where it is not used, people die. If we can prevent malaria and other insect-carried diseases in the first place, we won’t have so many people sick and out of work. Families won’t have to spend their savings on treatment. Doctors and nurses won’t be overwhelmed, and will have the time and resources to address other health problems. It’s that simple.

But too many politicians and activists have made it impossible to prevent the disease by killing and repelling mosquitoes. They constantly oppose DDT use and insist that developing countries rely on insecticide-treated bed nets, larvae-eating fish and other strategies that are simply inadequate.

Malaria is no longer a killer in western countries – because they used DDT to help eradicate the disease decades ago. That may be a key reason as why many well-off westerners talk about environmental considerations being supreme, and tell Africans and other third world countries not to use pesticides because of supposed health risks and environmental damage.

Malaria also has nothing to do with global warming. It existed for centuries in northern Europe and even in Siberia. The same mosquito species still live there. They just don’t carry malaria anymore, and so cannot transmit it to people. That’s what we want to do in Africa.

Americans would never tolerate being told they could not protect their children – or that they should rely on bed nets or wait more long years for new drug treatments or magic mosquitoes that cannot carry malaria. But Africans are repeatedly told we have to be content with exactly these limited safeguards, while parents and children get sick and die. That is inhumane and imperialistic.

If wealthy nations and NGOs really want to help developing nations, they should support fossil fuel power plants for reliable, affordable electricity. They should support DDT as an important part of the solution to eradicate this serial killer, so that Africans can work, spend less on malaria, have more money for other healthcare and family needs, and develop as much as rich nations have.

Via email




Leading Climate Scientist Says Debating Scientific Theories Would Be ‘Un-American’

Way, way back in April 2017, scientists around the world participated in the ‘March for Science’ as a show of force and unity against an allegedly anti-science Trump administration. Their motto was “science not silence”: many wrote that mantra on pieces of duct tape and stuck it across their mouths.

March for Science organizers claimed that “the best way to ensure science will influence policy is to encourage people to appreciate and engage with science. That can only happen through education, communication, and ties of mutual respect between scientists and their communities — the paths of communication must go both ways.”

But that was so three months ago.

Many scientists are now rejecting an open debate on anthropogenic global warming. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt appears ready to move forward with a “red-team, blue-team” exercise, where two groups of scientists publicly challenge each other’s evidence on manmade climate change. The idea was floated during a Congressional hearing last spring and outlined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Steve Koonin, former undersecretary of energy in the Obama administration. Koonin said the public is unaware of the intense debate in climate science and how “consensus statements necessarily conceal judgment calls and debates and so feed the “settled,” “hoax” and “don’t know” memes that plague the political dialogue around climate change.”

It would work this way: A red team of scientists critiques a key climate assessment. The blue team responds. The back-and-forth continues until all the evidence is aired and refuted, followed by public hearings and an action plan based on the findings. It happens entirely out in the open. Koonin said this approach is used in high-consequence situations and “very different and more rigorous than traditional peer review, which is usually confidential and always adjudicated, rather than public and moderated.” (Climate scientist Judith Curry has a good primer on this concept here.)

Pruitt is prepared to pull the trigger on this idea, according to an article in E&E News last week. In an interview with Breitbart News on June 5, Pruitt touted the red-team, blue-team initiative, saying that “the American people need to have that type of honest open discussion, and it’s something we hope to provide as part of our leadership.”

Instead Of Dialoguing, Climate Scientists Preach

Now you would think the scientific establishment would embrace an opportunity to present their case to a wary, if disinterested, public. You would think the 97 percent of scientists who supposedly all agree human activity is causing climate change would eagerly line up to vanquish climate deniers, especially those in the Trump administration. You would think the same folks who fear a science-averse President Trump would be relieved his administration is encouraging a rigorous, forensic inquiry into the most consequential scientific issue of our time that has wide-ranging economic, social, and political ramifications around the world.

You would think.

But instead, many scientists and activists are expressing outrage at this logical suggestion, even advising colleagues not to participate. In a June 21 Washington Post op-ed, three top climate scientists repudiated the red-team concept, offended by the slightest suggestion that climate science needs fixing. Naomi Oreskes, Benjamin Salter, and Kerry Emanuel wrote that “calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.”

In a July 1 post full of irony, leading climate scientist Ken Caldeira blasts the climate contest: “We don’t want red team/blue team because science doesn’t line up monolithically for or against scientific positions.” What? Never mind the 97 percent consensus claim that’s been shoved down our throats for the past decade. (Caldeira also wrote just a few months ago that “the evidence for human-induced global warming is now so strong that no sensible person can deny a human role in these temperature increases. We can argue about what we should or should not do … but the argument is over.”)

Caldeira then smugly questions why “politicians who have never engaged in any scientific inquiry in their lives believe themselves to be the experts who should tell scientists how to conduct their business?” (Shall we then ask why scientists who have never engaged in any legislative or political endeavor in their lives believe themselves to be the experts who should tell lawmakers how to conduct their business?)

Climate Scientists Fear Losing Power, Nothing Else

Then there is the interminably-petulant and prosaic Michael Mann, who routinely dishes out the “denier” name to anyone who crosses him, and recently compared himself to a Holocaust survivor. Mann told ThinkProgress that the red-team concept is “un-American” and a ruse to “run a pro-fossil fuel industry disinformation campaign aimed at confusing the public and policymakers over what is potentially the greatest threat we face as a civilization.”

Aha! Right there is the key objection to the entire exercise: the risk to their political power. These activists know that climate change long ago stopped being about science. It is a liberal, big-government agenda wrapped up in a green cloak of superiority and virtue. For the past decade, the pro-climate crusaders have ruled policymaking, from international organizations to federal agencies down to your local park district. The Trump administration poses the first threat to their dominance, and instead of being up to the task of defending it — in public, with evidence and not platitudes, facing scientists they have smeared for not being part of the ‘consensus’ – they want to walk away.

That’s why I hope Pruitt proceeds with it. Let the blue team have an empty bench that will show American exactly what they think of ‘science’ – and them.

SOURCE

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