The coffee bean belt: climate change map

Climate varies naturally all the time.  Saying that the variations noted below are due to anthropogenic global warming is nothing but an unproven assertion.

Climate change poses a serious threat to the world’s coffee “bean belt” and the 60-plus countries that produce the commodity. With 21.5m people involved in coffee farming, says the International Coffee Organization, 85 per cent of output is produced by smallholders.

“We know just how vulnerable farmers are to losing their crops as a result of climate change,” says Anna Pierides, coffee supply chain manager at the non-profit Fairtrade Foundation.

Compared with 10 years ago “people are really starting to see the impact,” says Aaron Davis, senior research leader at Kew’s royal botanic gardens in London. “It is the most serious concern for the coffee industry.”

Arabica coffee — 60 per cent of global output — grows in tropical highlands and performs best at an average temperature of 18C-21C. Lower-grade robusta — largely for the instant-coffee market — grows in low-lying regions.

“Combined changes in temperature and precipitation are the main avenues through which climate change affects coffee production,” says Charles Agwanda, co-ordinator at the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International in Kenya.

Potentially hard times lie ahead. A 1.2C average temperature rise in Brazil, the world’s main producer, would threaten to cut 7 per cent of its 2.25m hectares of bean-growing land.

In 1899, Puerto Rico was the sixth largest world producer with about 770 sq km of coffee land. USDA Caribbean Climate Hub projections say this could fall to 24 sq km by this century’s end.

Productive area in Ethiopia, coffee’s original homeland, could fall by up to 60 per cent through the century. A 2C average rise in temperature would threaten much of Uganda’s coffee output.

In India, rainfall has decreased by a third in certain regions, where pests assisted by higher temperatures substantially lower yields.

Rising temperatures tend to force growers upslope. Where coffee was previously grown up to 2,200m in Ethiopia, says Mr Davis, the level has risen to 2,600m.

SOURCE





Climate Believers Won’t Go Cool On Global Warming, They’ve An Industry To Support

Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times

If you find a spare moment this weekend, check out the online biography of Professor Michael Grubb. He is a busy and hitherto (one would hope) important man.

Professor of climate change policy at University College London. Editor-in-chief of something called Climate Policy — hurry, hurry while stocks last. Adviser to the energy regulator Ofgem. Member of the government’s climate change committee. Adviser to the Germans on something to do with climate and to the European parliament’s exciting “progressive economy initiative”. And more, much more besides.

It’s a wonder Mikey even has time to step outside and see how the weather is looking, so feted has he been on account of his unquestionable knowledge about what is happening to our climate. Unquestionable, because climate change is a “settled science”, and those who question its reality or impact are “deniers”, like those who would deny the Holocaust ever happened.

Early one morning last week, as the dawn chorus began in what has been a colder September than usual, Mikey was roused from his slumbers by his wife, holding the report he’s just written, shrieking in his ear: “Professor Grubb, Professor Grubb, you have to know this: your entire life is a lie. Ha ha ha! All a terrible lie!” OK, I cannot be entirely certain this happened. I don’t even know if Grubb has a wife. But it should have happened, even if it didn’t.

Last week we learnt from a study co-authored by Grubb in the impeccable and neutral source Nature Geoscience that we have all been taken for a costly ride by the climate change people. The Earth is not heating up anything like they all told us it was. For years they had been telling us we will very soon burn to a crisp, accompanied by the howling of polar bears. Grubb himself suggested in 2015 that we would need to abandon democracy to address the rapid and calamitous rise in the Earth’s temperature.

Politicians were dragooned to the cause. Billions were spent in this country alone, subsidising useless wind farms and taxing ordinary people on their energy bills. People who opposed these strictures — the deniers — were called antediluvian and climate change activists demanded that those who challenged their views should not even be allowed to express their opinions. Only they had the truth. Except, it wasn’t the truth.

So what went wrong? Take a look at Prof Grubb’s CV and you might get an inkling. Science is supposed to be neutral, but it is never so when co-opted for political reasons. Call it “settled” and it becomes a kind of anti-science, an article of faith deeply resistant to investigation. Call a university department “climate change” and you immediately sign up to it as an indisputable fact. And suddenly a huge and lucrative industry is born, with panels and intergovernmental committees, transnational policy initiatives, world summits and swingeing taxes on the poorest. And the climate change proponents are required to hype up the rhetoric, to provide politicians with suitably scary predictions.

Even after last week’s revelations in Nature Geoscience, the mentalist wing of the climate change lobby was still shrieking — in The Guardian, natch. It will all lead to “the collapse of civilisation”, one daffy woman reported, while a bloke called John said those who disagreed with him were “elderly white male climate-deniers”.

Ah, John. I am white, male and getting elderly. I don’t deny the climate. I can see it, doing its stuff, outside my window. And as a layman I would guess that we have probably contributed to the warming of the planet. How much? I don’t know — and nor do you, for that matter. You haven’t a clue. It’s just an article of faith. And, as Karl Popper might tell you, that ain’t science.

SOURCE


   
 

Now it’s a war on pipelines

Efforts to block and sabotage pipelines hurt jobs, economic growth, middle class, human safety

Paul Driessen

The radical environmentalist war on fossil fuels has opened a new front: a war on pipelines.

For years, activist zealots claimed the world was rapidly depleting its oil and natural gas supplies. The fracking revolution (horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing) obliterated that argument, by sending US oil and gas production to new heights. Indeed, it was record gas supplies and plummeting gas prices, combined with the Obama EPA war on coal, that closed down so many coal-fired power plants.

So the battle increasingly shifted to the far more emotional claim that continued reliance on fossil fuels (which provide over 80% of the US and global energy that powers modern civilization and living standards) will cause dangerous manmade global warming and climate change. This gave birth to the climate and renewable energy consortium and the “keep it in the ground” movement. No evidence to the contrary will budge them from their hysteria-laden talking points on looming climate cataclysms.

The journal Nature Geoscience recently published a careful study that found there has been far less planetary warming since 1998 than alarmist scientists and computer models had predicted. Because the models are based on the assumption that carbon dioxide drives climate change, they “run too hot,” resulting in predictions that deviate from actual temperature measurements more and more every year.

But instead of admitting they were wrong, the usual strident suspects in the climate crisis industry doubled down and attacked the study and any news outlet that called attention to it. Britain’s BBC denounced the inconvenient study and displayed not a whit of apology over its climate chaos claims.

Climate campaigners jumped all over Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, insisting without an iota of evidence that manmade greenhouse gases had created or at least intensified them. They’re making the equally absurd claim that shutting down US and Canadian pipelines will somehow reduce atmospheric CO2 levels and prevent climate change and extreme weather – even though China already has 2,363 coal-fired power plants and is adding 1,171 more; India has 589 and is adding another 446; Indonesia and Vietnam are adding 140 to their fleet; and even Germany is burning more coal every year.

Pipelines carry conventional, fracking and oil sands petroleum to markets: natural gas to homes and power plants, oil to refineries, oil and gas to petrochemical plants – and crude oil, refined products and liquefied natural gas to export terminals that send the energy to Europe and Asia. If they can’t prevent companies from producing oil and gas, hydrocarbon haters want to prevent them from shipping it.

“Obviously the best means of transporting oil is none,” said an activist involved in campaigns against the Keystone XL Pipeline. But if there is going to be increased production, “I would rather it go by train.”

Some pipeline protesters somehow think rail or truck transport means the oil will be used domestically, whereas pipelined crude will more likely go to coastal refineries and be shipped overseas. Others claim pipelines are less safe than truck or railroad tanker cars. They cite a 2013 International Energy Agency report that said railroad transport is six times more likely to have an accident than pipelines are – but pipelines spill three times as much oil per-billion-barrel-miles of fuel transported.

However, the study is seriously outdated. It analyzed data from 2004 to 2012 – before the surge in US oil production … and before a monumental increase in rail transportation was necessitated by protests and Obama Administration decisions blocking construction of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines.

In 2014, the USA set a new record for railroad tanker spills: 141 – versus an average of 24 during the years covered by the IEA report. Rail accidents in Colorado, Virginia, West Virginia and other states resulted in significant oil spills, evacuations and even serious explosions, but fortunately no deaths. However, a 2013 disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec burned 47 people to death and left many others seriously injured. The danger of moving oil on rails and highways through populated areas is clearly high.

Better track maintenance, stronger tanker cars, improved train scheduling and other safety practices would reduce rail accidents and spills. However, US State Department studies concluded that the Keystone pipeline would likely result in fewer than 520 barrels of crude being spilled annually, compared to 32,000 barrels in three rail spills that it evaluated. The same holds true for other modern pipelines.

New pipelines are built with state-of-the-art pipe and other components, to the latest design, manufacturing and construction specifications. Warning systems, automatic shutoff valves, 24/7/365 monitoring and other safeguards further minimize the risk of spills. New lines often replace older pipes that carry greater risks of corrosion and rupturing as they age. New lines can often be routed to avoid population centers and sensitive water and wildlife areas. Because they are underground, once they are installed and grasses are planted, pipelines are invisible except for occasional pumping stations, valves and other small facilities.

Environmentalists tend to focus on potential volumes of oil spilled when a major pipeline rupture occurs, and on impacts to waterways and wildlife. While these are important considerations, human safety should always be of paramount concern. Lac-Mégantic underscores that priority.

Light crude oils from North Dakota’s Bakken Field and other shale plays contain more dissolved gases and thus are more flammable than heavier crudes. That makes explosions more likely. On highways and along rail lines through rural or urban communities, the results would be devastating. The sheer volume of oil to be shipped further underscores these dangers.

The 1,172-mile-long Dakota Access Pipe Line alone carries some 470,000 barrels of oil every day. Hauling that quantity overland would require 700 rail tanker cars per day (256,000 per year) or 2,000 semi-trailer tanker trucks per day on our highways (730,000 per year)! All would go through populated areas along parts of their route. Multiply that times the Keystone and other pipelines in planning or under construction, and the rail/truck “alternative” is mind-boggling in its scale and risks.

A new technology transforms heavy crude oil into pill-sized pellets – self-sealing balls of bitumen that can then be moved in coal rail cars or transported in trucks with less risk of spills. That may eventually reduce the need for new pipelines; but the innovative idea is currently only in the testing stage.

Moreover, we cannot ship natural gas by tanker truck or rail car. Pipelines are essential for that – unless the gas is chilled and liquefied, adding major cost and safety considerations. That’s one more reason 2.5 million miles of liquid petroleum, gas transmission and gas distribution lines already crisscross the USA.

Even more important, some activists are now going far beyond mere rhetoric and protests – and engaging in sabotage of pipeline construction equipment and even pipeline safety valves. These intolerable acts should be met with police action, major fines and lengthy jail terms. Free speech and peaceful protests are a constitutional right. Eco-terrorism and threats to public safety cannot be tolerated.

These radical activists would never give up their reliance on – and addiction to – computers, smart phones, synthetic fiber shoes and clothing, affordable heating and air conditioning, cars, skis, kayaks, wind turbines and solar panels, and all the other blessings that petroleum brings. They should not expect the rest of us to give them up, either. Especially based on the flimsy arguments they present.

For all these reasons, it is hard to understand the increasing opposition of some states and communities to new pipelines: from Minnesota to New York and even Virginia and West Virginia.

It is even harder to understand or tolerate the actions of these tax-exempt anti-pipeline organizations – and equally callous and devious tax-exempt outfits that fund the radical groups: from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to the Sea Change Foundation and its secretive Russian donors, and even to railroad tycoon Warren Buffett’s NoVo Foundation. If they can block pipelines, they will next block rail and truck transport.

If an increasingly divided, partisan, dysfunctional Congress cannot address these problems, let us hope the Trump Administration and some state governors and legislators will do so.

Via email




Britain needs an energy revolution – stop the terrible renewable subsidies

It was reported this week that the estimated cost of energy produced by new offshore wind farms has halved in two years. Many observers seemed to conclude that Britain’s energy problems have been solved. The truth is rather different.

Britain still has significant trouble with its energy retail market, its power generation, and its energy strategy. All three require decisive government action.

The retail market is supposed to be founded on competition, with consumers switching between companies and tariffs. In practice, only a quarter of households have ever switched tariff with the same provider, and less than half have ever switched supplier.

The big energy firms rip off customers who do not switch. Two thirds – 18.5 million households – are on expensive default contracts. We need lower prices, and to get them we need a new energy strategy based on competition and a sensible regulatory framework.

For that to happen, there must be meaningful price transparency for all forms of power generation, including nuclear power and renewables. This will require a new approach to reducing carbon emissions.

There is no need to abandon our international commitments, and no need to abandon the Climate Change Act. We should, however, change the trajectory of Britain’s decarbonisation plans, so a greater share of the reduction comes later, through technological innovation, rather than earlier, through the imposition of higher energy costs and lower industrial output.

This would allow us to take sensible measures, like reducing Britain’s carbon price, which increases costs by pricing every tonne of carbon dioxide at three times the level set by the EU’s Emissions Trading System. It would also allow us fully to exploit the opportunities that lie in Britain’s shale gas reserves.

Proper price transparency and competition should mean no more subsidies for renewable energy. The Government has set out its intention to reduce these costs, but Britain has spent over £23 billion on subsidies for renewables since 2002, and now is the time to phase them out completely.

With the falling price of offshore wind, this should not be a problem. Wind power is still expensive: its intermittency causes higher costs elsewhere in the system, and this should be reflected in estimates of wind’s true cost. But it will almost certainly play an important role in Britain’s energy mix and, if its supporters are correct, it should not need subsidies to do so.

Price transparency would also mean no more nuclear deals without price competition from other providers. It might therefore mean no new nuclear at all, and it should certainly mean no new deals like Hinkley Point. And it would mean an end to long-term renewable contracts with guaranteed excessive prices.

Instead, energy technologies would compete against one another on a level playing field. That would mean a more rational energy market, with prices that are fairer for households and more competitive for industry.

SOURCE



Global warming alarmists need to lose the arrogance

Susan Stamper Brown

Natural disasters are no laughing matter, but you'd never know that recently watching God-denier Bill Maher and his "Real Time" show audience.

Maher appeared giddy with delight that homes of certain high-profile man-controlled climate change "deniers' were in the path of destructive hurricanes.

Meanwhile, during an interview, actress Jennifer Lawrence suggested hurricanes were "signs of Mother Nature's rage and wrath" for not believing in manmade climate change and electing Donald Trump.

Maher and Lawrence and other global warming barkers always fail to factor in the God-factor. Natural disasters aren't leftwing attack dogs who target those who dare question the cogency of man-caused and man-controlled climate change.

We know this because while Maher and Lawrence and others were superciliously wagging accusatory fingers, hurricanes Harvey and Irma wreaked havoc on some predominately leftwing metropolises that went for Hillary Clinton: Houston and Harris County, Texas and Key West and Miami and Palm Beach and Orange County, FL.

Using Lawrence's illogic, "mother nature" must have it out for Hillary Clinton supporters!

It is both arrogant and ignorant to cast blame for natural disasters on people, let alone people smart enough to question something that is quickly morphing into what seems like an autocratic religion across the globe.

Man-caused warming is questioned because there is indisputable scientific evidence this isn't the Earth's first rodeo when it comes to cyclical cooling and warming.

The Earth experienced periods of glaciation followed by melting long before Leonardo DiCaprio's excessive use of private jets and the construction of Al Gore's energy devouring Nashville dream home.

Robert Ballard, the world-renown underwater archaeologist who discovered the wreckages of the Titanic, the Bismarck, RMS Lusitania, USS Yorktown and others, has linked one of those previous melting periods to Noah's Great Flood.

In 2012, Ballard told ABC News, "Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube." "But then it started to melt," he said. "We're talking about the floods of our living history."

Ballard said he believes he discovered proof of Noah's flood in the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey when he discovered "traces of an ancient civilization hidden underwater since the time of Noah." Ballard said his group discovered evidence of "not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed" and "the land that went under stayed under."

Ballard carbon-dated unearthed shells discovered four hundred feet below the surface, establishing a timeline which happened to occur around the same time as Noah's flood. Ballard described his discovery as what was like "a bad day...at some magic moment it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometers of land, went under."

SOURCE

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