Global carbon emissions reached a record high in 2018

Half the story again, in the usual Leftist way.  I have yet to see them give the whole story on anything.  They can't afford to. Reality is solidly against their dreams.

I am not for a minute going to challenge their claim of maximal CO2 levels this year.  CO2 has been rising fairly steadily for many years now.  But why does that matter?  CO2 is referred to only because of its supposed influence on the global temperature.  So it is the temperature that is the real issue. It is the temperature that is the important part of the story.  Warmist theory does say that as CO2 levels go up so will temperatures.  So were the temperatures in fact higher in 2018?

We can check that.  Anyone can check that. Go here for the official GISS monthly temperature record.  You will see that in all months but one the 2018 temperatures were LOWER than 2016.  If we can take just one year as informative -- which Warmists regularly do -- the temperature is in fact FALLING!


Global emissions of carbon dioxide have reached the highest levels on record, scientists projected Wednesday, in the latest evidence of the chasm between international goals for combating climate change and what countries are actually doing.

Between 2014 and 2016, emissions remained largely flat, leading to hopes that the world was beginning to turn a corner. Those hopes have been dashed. In 2017, global emissions grew 1.6 percent. The rise in 2018 is projected to be 2.7 percent.

The expected increase, which would bring fossil fuel and industrial emissions to a record high of 37.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, is being driven by nearly 5 percent emissions growth in China and more than 6 percent in India, researchers estimated, along with growth in many other nations throughout the world. Emissions by the United States grew 2.5 percent, while emissions by the European Union declined by just under 1 percent.

As nations are gathered for climate talks in Poland, the message of Wednesday’s report was unambiguous: When it comes to promises to begin cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change, the world remains well off target.

‘‘We are in trouble. We are in deep trouble with climate change,’’ United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said this week at the opening of the 24th annual UN climate conference, where countries will wrestle with the ambitious goals they need to meet to sharply reduce carbon emissions in coming years.

‘‘It is hard to overstate the urgency of our situation,’’ he added. ‘‘Even as we witness devastating climate impacts causing havoc across the world, we are still not doing enough, nor moving fast enough, to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption.’’

Guterres was not commenting specifically on Wednesday’s findings, which were released in a trio of scientific papers by researchers with the Global Carbon Project. But his words came amid a litany of grim news in the fall in which scientists have warned that the effects of climate change are no longer distant and hypothetical, and that the impacts of global warming will only intensify in the absence of aggressive international action.

Scientists have said that annual carbon dioxide emissions need to plunge almost by half by the year 2030 if the world wants to hit the most stringent — and safest — climate change target. That would be either keeping the Earth’s warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius — when it is already at 1 degrees — or only briefly ‘‘overshooting’’ that temperature.

More HERE




Brendan Clark is a sad soul.  He is brimming over with hate

Brendan Clark [b.clark.ma@gmail.com] sent the following message to Marc Morano.  Most of the Left cannot argue.  Abuse is all they have.  It must be very uncomfortable to be so full of rage

Messaging you to let you know how much of a horrible person I believe you to be. The propaganda you spread is horrifying. I cannot wait for the day you die and are sent straight to hell, in fact I pray for it every day. From now on you will receive an email from me once a day until you are dead. Dont try to block me as I will just make a new email.
Go fuck your mother




America turned into a net oil exporter last week, breaking 75 years of continued dependence on foreign oil

The shift to net exports is the dramatic result of an unprecedented boom in American oil production, with thousands of wells pumping from the Permian region of Texas and New Mexico to the Bakken in North Dakota to the Marcellus in Pennsylvania.

While the country has been heading in that direction for years, this week’s dramatic shift came as data showed a sharp drop in imports and a jump in exports to a record high. Given the volatility in weekly data, the U.S. will likely remain a small net importer most of the time.

“We are becoming the dominant energy power in the world,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research. “But, because the change is gradual over time, I don’t think it’s going to cause a huge revolution, but you do have to think that OPEC is going to have to take that into account when they think about cutting.”

The shale revolution has transformed oil wildcatters into billionaires and the U.S. into the world’s largest petroleum producer, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia. The power of OPEC has been diminished, undercutting one of the major geopolitical forces of the last half century. The cartel and its allies are meeting in Vienna this week, trying to make a tough choice to cut output and support prices, risking the loss of more market share to the U.S.

The U.S. sold overseas last week a net 211,000 barrels a day of crude and refined products such as gasoline and diesel, compared to net imports of about 3 million barrels a day on average so far in 2018, and an annual peak of more than 12 million barrels a day in 2005, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The EIA said the U.S. has been a net oil importer in weekly data going back to 1991 and monthly data starting in 1973. Oil historians that have compiled even older annual data using statistics from the American Petroleum Institute said the country has been a net oil importer since 1949, when Harry Truman was at the White House.


The massive Permian may be even bigger than previously thought. The Delaware Basin, the less drilled part of the field, holds more than twice the amount of crude as its sister, the Midland Basin, the U.S. Geological Service said Thursday.

While the net balance shows the U.S. is selling more petroleum than buying, American refiners continue to buy millions of barrels each day of overseas crude and fuel. The U.S. imports more than 7 million barrels a day of crude from all over the globe to help feed its refineries, which consume more than 17 million barrels each day. In turn, the U.S. has become the world’s top fuel supplier.

“The U.S. is now a major player in the export market,” said Brian Kessens, who helps manage $16 billion at Tortoise in Leawood, Kansas. “We continue to re-tool our export infrastructure along the Gulf Coast to expand capacity, and you continue to see strong demand globally for crude oil.”

On paper, the shift to net oil imports means that the U.S. is today energy independent, achieving a rhetorical aspiration for generations of American politicians, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. Yet, it’s a paper tiger achievement: In reality, the U.S. remains exposed to global energy prices, still affected by the old geopolitics of the Middle East.

U.S. crude exports are poised to rise even further, with new pipelines from the Permian in the works and at least nine terminals planned that will be capable of loading supertankers. The only facility currently able to load the largest ships, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, is on pace to load more oil in December than it has in any other month.

SOURCE 





SCOTUS Rejects Ecofascist Challenge to Border Wall

President Trump gets an all-too-rare immigration win in the courts

A gaggle of three ecofascist groups just saw their hopes of preventing President Donald Trump from constructing a border wall based upon their environmental “concerns” rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices refused to take up the case in which California Federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel had ruled in February in favor of Trump. Curiel determined that the president had not exceeded his powers and had the legal authority to waive environmental laws based upon a 1996 law that was designed to stem illegal immigration.

In his ruling, Curiel quoted Chief Justice John Roberts: “Court(s) are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgements. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” That was Roberts’s opinion in upholding ObamaCare despite clear constitutional reasons to strike it down, so Curiel’s choice of a quote was … interesting.

It’s important to note that it takes the approval of only four justices for a case to be heard before the High Court. Thus, the fact that not even four justices agreed to hear arguments sends the message that this case — obviously aimed at stymying Trump’s immigration-enforcement agenda — didn’t meet muster even for the Court’s left wing.

This is a clear win for Trump. It’s also ironic given that it originated with Curiel, a judge Trump previously criticized in a 2016 lawsuit regarding his now-defunct Trump University. At the time, Trump accused Curiel of being biased due to his Mexican heritage. But Curiel acted as any good judge should — upon the merits of the case as it relates to the law and not upon personal animus or bias.

Whether Trump gets congressional funding to build the wall is another matter entirely, but at least this roadblock cooked up by anti-Trump ecofascists has been removed.

SOURCE 





Barmaid Sandy declares climate change 'the civil rights movement of our generation'

It's just a political football

Liberal Democrats and environmental groups are urging the next Congress to do more to push back against the effects of climate change after watching the issue get sidelined over the first two years of the Trump administration.

Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont hosted a town hall Monday where he and other “climate justice” warriors, including Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, warned that the longer President Trump and elected leaders refuse to address the “great crisis,” the more that people, the planet and the economy will be hurt.

“The time is late,” Mr. Sanders said. “Countries all over the world are going to have to stand up [and] take on the fossil fuel industry if we are going to leave our kids and our grandchildren a planet that is habitable.

“This is a crisis situation,” he said. “It is unprecedented and we have got to act in an unprecedented way.”

The town hall event coincided with the start of the United Nations climate change summit in Poland and came about a month after Democrats took control of the House — leaving activists excited about the role that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other activists turned politicians could play in focusing more attention on the issue.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez highlighted her push for a “Green New Deal” that calls for a select committee to put together a plan to combat climate change by 2020.

“This is going to be the great society, the moon shot, the civil rights movement of our generation,” she said.

The calls for action on climate change spiked last month after 13 federal agencies released a report — the Fourth National Climate Change Assessment — that provided stark warnings about how rising temperatures could lead to more drought, fires and flooding, and devastate the economy and people’s health.

Mr. Trump, who has rolled back regulation targeting carbon emissions, dismissed the findings and GOP lawmakers have basically followed suit.

Likely contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination have pounced on the report, and the issue. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is slated on Tuesday to be in Iowa to screen a new documentary called “Paris to Pittsburgh” that highlights the impact of climate change and what people are doing to address the problem.

The title of the documentary, which Mr. Bloomberg helped finance, alludes to Mr. Trump’s announcement last year that he was pulling the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement because, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

“Iowans understand what too many leaders in Washington don’t: Fighting climate change is good for our health and our economy,” Mr. Bloomberg said Monday in a Des Moines Register op-ed.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, another likely 2020 contender introduced legislation this year that would mandate public companies disclose more information about their exposure to climate-related risks. Half the bill’s eight co-sponsors — Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Kamala D. Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — are thought to be lining up presidential bids.

Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, has called on her caucus to revive a select committee on climate change that was defunded when Republicans took over the chamber, and others have vowed to tackle the issue in congressional hearings.

It remains to be seen how much could change legislatively in Washington next year — particularly with Republicans calling the shots in the Senate.

What is clear is that climate is poised to get more of a look in the Democrat-controlled House, where lawmakers already are laying out plans to hold a series of congressional hearings on the subject early next year.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez helped thrust the issue into the headlines last month when she joined grass-roots activists protesting outside Mrs. Pelosi’s office last month demanding more action on climate change.

“I believe that the progressive movement is the only movement that has answers right now,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said Monday.

SOURCE 





The Climate Change Ignorance Of Millenials

If the hair doesn’t go up on the back of your neck when reading this sort of thing, it damn well should.

It was a moment of the kind that changes lives. At a press conference held by climate activists Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us journalists pressed the organisers on whether their aims were realistic. They have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by 2025. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims?

A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t spoken before, but the passion, grief and fury of her response was utterly compelling. “What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing extinction. When you ask questions like that, what is it you want me to feel?” We had no answer.

Softer aims might be politically realistic, but they are physically unrealistic. Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our existential crises have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism, tinkering at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get us out.

Oh really?

The entire premise rests on the belief that there are exponential tipping points beyond which there is no redemption, ever, when it comes to climate — and we’re driving the Earth’s systems in the direction that will reach them.

Let me point that there is no scientific evidence for that position.  None whatsoever.

There is, however, nearly-irrefutable evidence for the converse.  It rests in the fact that we’re here, today, on this rock.

What am I referring to?  What are known in concert as buffering reactions.

The Earth possesses them as does every living thing on the planet both through physical chemistry and, in the case of living things, biological process. This is irrefutable fact.

You are alive because of such buffering reactions.  One of hundreds in your body, which is a complex biochemical process, deals with respiration.  The process of biochemical reactions that produce energy in your body result in CO2 and other waste products (uric acid, etc) being released.

The CO2 in the blood stream is a dissolved gas and dissolving a gas disassociates the ions in question; the result is a small amount of CH2O3, or carbonic acid, being present in the blood.  That in turn slightly lowers blood pH since acids, by definition, have a lower than neutral pH.

Your body reacts to this by increasing the respiration (breathing) rate.  The CO2 is thus expelled from the body and the carbonic acid is removed, slightly raising the pH of the blood.  Your breathing then slows.

Let me emphasize something here: The change in pH as a result of this process is extremely small; normal blood pH ranges from 7.35 to 7.45 (7.0 is neutral.)

Yet your body, indeed that of every animal that respires, is tuned to these extraordinarily small changes and responds with a buffering reaction that attempts to reverse that change.  It does so automatically and immediately — within seconds.

Most people believe that the body keeps arterial O2 saturation in the blood at almost-100% by direct biochemical measurement.  Not so.  This is why you will suffocate silently and painlessly if you breathe an atmosphere that has no oxygen in it.

Your body doesn’t think anything is wrong because there is no increase in CO2 level nor change in blood pH, there is no respiratory response or distress (breathing faster trying to get what little O2 may exist), you just pass out and die.

Now if you are chronically diseased (such as by smoking for decades) then this reaction will become damaged.  Normally, without a secondary mechanism to regulate respiration, that condition would immediately kill you as your O2 saturation would fall below lethal limits or your blood pH would go out of the required range to support life.

It doesn’t, because the body has a secondary mechanism; it can directly determine O2 saturation to some degree and if your CO2 sensing mechanism is damaged to the point that it doesn’t function properly it is capable of taking over sufficiently to keep you alive.  But that “backup” is much slower, much less-precise and your exercise tolerance is essentially zero if your body is using that mechanism.

The Earth has thousands of such buffering reactions.  The oceans, specifically and just as one of these reactions, have an utterly enormous amount of carbonate dissolved in them.  You might recognize that word, and you should, because it’s the same molecule — CO2 — that is dissolved in the blood.

The oceans (indeed, all bodies of water) constantly exchange CO2 with the atmosphere.  This is known.  But what’s not known well at all is exactly what sort of boundaries are on this reaction, where equilibrium points are, what shifts said equilibrium points, or what the shape of the curve looks like in the actual world rather than in a laboratory.

It’s a hell of a lot more-complex than it first appears and there’s a damn good argument to be made that this singular buffering reaction is largely responsible for the possibility of life on this rock.

Throughout the history of the planet some extremely large disruptive events have happened.  Very large volcanic eruptions that make anything experienced in the history books look like firecrackers and asteroid strikes to name two.  We know these happened because they leave behind direct evidence, and we know roughly when they happened.

In the absence of buffering reactions within the larger context of the planet’s chemistry life on this rock would have been extinguished millions of years ago and this would be a lifeless rock.  It wasn’t and isn’t.

Now it is absolutely true that the Earth cannot support unlimited and permanent exponential population growth of any species.

There is no such thing as permanent exponential growth of anything, ever, period.  You must stop such growth voluntarily at some point or you will be forced to stop by a foldback event where you cannot support what you grew.  This is true for populations and it is true for economies.

Governments refuse to accept this and make promises based on the belief they can violate this law of mathematics.  They’re not just “wrong” by accident either — they know they’re lying.

As I pointed out in Leverage behind every unit of GDP is a unit of energy.  Energy can neither be created or destroyed; it can be exchanged through nuclear reactions with matter (E = MC^2 and all) but if stored by some process and then released it is inherently dissipated back into the environment.

Sequestering the product somewhere (again) also requires energy from some other place; CO2 is sequestered into plant material by solar energy as just one example. All chemical reactions have (although often omitted when not being quoted by a chemist or other scientist) an energy term in joules/mol — either liberated or required.  There is no such thing as a free lunch.

While it would be nice to postulate that we will come up with some sort of Star Trek technology improvement before we hit the natural limits and foldback points of exponential expansion, especially of people, that’s not exactly comforting.

Maybe we will and maybe we won’t, but history suggests it will be won’t and we’ll get the nasty.  Nature has a way of doing that, and the “nasty” is frequently something like the plague that kills off a material percentage of the population!

In point of fact warming and higher CO2 levels are, on a planetary scale, beneficial.  Higher atmospheric CO2 levels make plants grow faster, which is good if you need them to either feed people directly or feed animals that then feed people.  In addition while warmer temperatures will shift crop production they too are beneficial in that longer growing seasons also improve crop yields.

While it is absolutely true that severe warming would inundate certain areas that’s a local issue, not a global one.  On a global — not local — basis if you are interested in trying to sustain an exponential population growth pattern for a longer period of time you want more CO2 in the atmosphere and you want a warmer climate — period.

This is a function of math, not politics.

If you could stop warming and CO2 emission then you need to also not only stop population growth you must kill off a material percentage of the people already here.  Those screamers who are hollering “emergency!” are in fact intending to do exactly that as it is the only way to get where they want to go.  What they won’t discuss is exactly who and how they intend to murder.  May I remind you that at least Hitler was quite clear in who he intended to (and did) target?

But for the globull-warming screamers as I noted recently in this column the more-likely scenario — by far — is that we’re setting up for a Maunder Minimum sort of event and there is nothing we can do about it since the source is that nuclear-fusion-based flaming ball in the sky commonly called “the Sun.”

If if in fact we are at the entry to a prolonged period of much less solar sunspot activity then the decrease in radiation absorbed by the planet will produce not warming but cooling which will utterly decimate global crop production and kill a couple of billion people.

Most of those who die won’t be in the “developed” world; the United States and Europe are capable of producing sufficient food, even with crop yields well below current levels, to avoid a famine-style problem.  Other parts of the world have managed to survive exponential population growth by importing food from places like the United States and if a Maunder Minimum style event comes to pass that source will be cut off because we will need that food here.

Thinking though the implications of that sort of thing ought to sober you up fast.  See, starving people do desperate things, and in a world where advanced, mass-destructive weaponry is not only fairly common it can be stolen and “proliferated” if you think such an event is going to take place without at least some of the starving trying to take what they need by force you also need to become a better student of history.

SOURCE 

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