Trump Administration Distorts the Facts On Climate Report

Below is the opening salvo from a "fact check" report.  The big trouble is what they accept as facts.  In prophecy there are no facts, only opinions, and the claim that we can know what the climate will be like in a hundred years  is a delusion and a fantasy.  Paranoid schizophrenics have been locked up for less.

So what do they describe as facts?  Basically, anything that Warmists say -- including the output of models with no known predictive skill. The article is in other words an opinion check, not a fact check

Since the National Climate Assessment dropped on Black Friday, members of the Trump administration have inaccurately attacked the report for lacking transparency and factual basis, and for focusing on an “extreme” climate scenario. The EPA has also suggested — without evidence — that the Obama administration “pushed” the “worst-case scenario.”

The report — which is the product of 13 federal agencies and more than 300 governmental and non-governmental experts — is legally required to be produced by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, or USGCRP, which issued its first assessment in 2000. It details how climate change is already affecting the country, from increased temperatures and flooding to more frequent hurricanes and large wildfires. It also looks at potential future consequences on the environment, infrastructure, human health and the economy.

President Donald Trump has largely dismissed the report. When asked about the assessment, the president has minimized the impact of human activity on climate change and made unrelated claims regarding the cleanliness of U.S. air and water, as we’ve written previously.

But more specific critiques came from administration officials and White House representatives.

For example, White House Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters released a statement to us that downplayed the report by claiming it “is largely based on the most extreme scenario,” adding, “we need to focus on improving the transparency and accuracy of our modeling and projections.” She also noted that the next climate assessment “gives us the opportunity to provide for a more transparent and data-driven process that includes fuller information on the range of potential scenarios and outcomes.”

Many of these talking points were reprised by White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders during a White House briefing on Nov. 27, when she said the report “is based on the most extreme modeled scenario,” is “not based on facts” and is “not data-driven.” Instead, she said, the report is “based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you’re talking about the climate.”

In an interview with the NBC affiliate in Sacramento, California, on Nov. 27, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke also referenced the scenarios, saying “it appears they took the worst scenarios and they built predictions upon that.” He added, “It should be more probability.”

Zinke, who has since resigned, also said “there is some concern within the USGS” about the climate report, referring to the U.S. Geological Survey, without providing any evidence.

Finally, acting Environmental Protection Agency head Andrew Wheeler said at a Washington Post Live event on Nov. 28 that he “wouldn’t be surprised if the Obama administration told the report’s authors, ‘Take a look at the worst-case scenario for this report.’” The EPA press office then doubled down on Wheeler’s speculation, issuing a press release that said the Obama administration “pushed” the “worst-case scenario'” and citing the Daily Caller’s reporting as proof of such manipulation.

These claims, however, are false, exaggerated or unsubstantiated:

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Democrats’ ‘Green Raw Deal’ Will Deliver Only Socialism And Misery

wind turbine energyDemocrats will try to flex their new-found electoral muscle in Congress by pushing for what has been described as the “largest expansion of government in decades.”

It’s called the Green New Deal, and it promises to be a major economic disaster if it ever becomes American law.

Those who think the Green New Deal is just a political ploy or a Democratic Party marketing gimmick for hipster millennials are in bad need of a wakeup call.

The Democrats’ plans will deliver soaring federal spending, a near doubling of U.S. taxes, declining standards of living, and even more debt on top of the already-massive $21 trillion we’ve piled up.

As The Daily Caller’s Michael Bastasch reports, “More than 40 Democratic lawmakers support the ‘Green New Deal’ as part of a broad plan to fight global warming and bring about what they see as ‘economic, social and racial justice.'” No doubt more will sign on in the coming weeks.

The scary thing is that the public, which knows next to nothing about the details of this plan, like it.

A poll conducted by Yale’s Program on Climate Communication and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication this month shows that 92% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans backed the plan.

But calling it a Green New Deal is really a misnomer. It’s really a starter package for turning our mostly free-market economy socialist. And no, that’s not hyperbole.

Green New Deal = Socialism

The GND starts with moving the energy grid to 100% renewable energy, something that will take highly efficient fossil fuels and replace them with highly inefficient “renewables” at a cost of about $5.2 trillion over 20 years.

But that’s not all. Not by a long shot.

The plan also wants job guarantees for those who lose their jobs due to the Green New Deal. That will be a lot of people. No estimate on that, but its cost too could go into the trillions.

But those who push this plan also seek a guaranteed minimum income and universal health care. Although those have nothing to do with “green” anything, it merely reveals that the real goal isn’t “green” at all — it’s socialism.

It turns out some have already researched the issue and made estimates of the costs.

The Mercatus Center last July looked at socialist Sen. and Venezuela admirer Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan, which the Democratic Party seems on its way to supporting.

It would cost just under $33 trillion over a decade, in addition to what we already pay for health care. The sums involved are staggering.

An Enormous Price Tag

Meanwhile, hedge fund manager and guru Ray Dalio estimates that a guaranteed minimum income of just $12,000 a year would cost $3.8 trillion.

So let’s do the basic math. Those two programs alone would cost $7.1 trillion a year. That compares with total federal spending in 2018 of $4.2 trillion.

That means at current levels spending would have to increase by 170%. So would taxes, by the way.

We wonder, are all those people who think a Green New Deal is a really nifty idea understand that?

Speaking of taxes, one of the favorite ways to fund this green socialist scheme is through a national carbon tax, which Democrats have already introduced in Congress.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a $25 per ton carbon tax would be a $1.1 trillion per year tax increase. “The carbon tax bill is a massive and continually ratcheting national energy tax,” reported the nonpartisan Americans for Tax Reform.

Not only would it be economically destabilizing and create massive inefficiencies in our economy, costing us hundreds of billions in output a year, but it also would expand the federal government’s reach into every private pocketbook and every American business.

We’d be Greece, without the charming ancient ruins.

That the main political force behind this fiscally insane plan is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the just-elected, extreme-far-left New York congresswoman, shows just how foolish it is.

She hasn’t served a single day in Congress, and yet desperate Democrats have lined up to follow her lead. It only shows how utterly bereft of common-sense the party has become.

Once the party of the middle-class and working Americans, it is now a party of academic elites, faux revolutionaries, and billionaires. It’s completely out of touch with real people and the real economy.

A ‘Green Raw Deal’

We repeat: Don’t be fooled. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the environment, and everything to do with socialism. Ocasio-Cortaz says the Green New Deal is about “social and racial justice.”

No, it isn’t. It’s a Green Raw Deal that will impoverish millions, destroy businesses and jobs, and end individual rights as we now know them.

Simply put, the socialism at the heart of this “new deal” amounts to centralized control of the economy and the people who work in it.

For the record, countries that adopt socialist policies have a knack for suddenly finding themselves in an unexpected run of “bad luck” that lasts decades. Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and Cuba all come to mind.

Sure, we know it will go nowhere in the GOP-dominated Senate. But what about after 2020? Americans better think long and hard before taking this hard left turn. It’s a road that leads to nowhere.

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Weather Forecasters Warn of Impending Danger as US Climate Skeptics Upend UN Climate Summit

KATOWICE, Poland—TV weather forecasters who understand the potential dangers of climate change are well-positioned to educate the public and spur them to take action, participants said in a panel discussion at the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held here earlier this month.

A major theme at the conference—widely known as COP24—was that severe remedial measures are needed to mitigate rising levels of carbon dioxide emissions before severe weather conditions can take hold.

The meeting, which ran from Dec. 2 to Dec. 14, took its inspiration from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which released a new report in October that concluded limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—rather than 2 degrees Celsius—between now and 2030 would be beneficial to human populations and ecosystems.

But the report’s Summary for Policymakers also said that “rapid,” “far-reaching,” and “unprecedented” changes would be needed across society to achieve this reduction in the rate of increase in temperature.

Enter Climate Without Borders, an organization founded in 2017, which brings together about 140 weather presenters (as the forecasters are commonly referred to outside the U.S.) from 110 countries.

Jill Peeters, a Belgian weather presenter, started the group when she placed all her weather contacts into a WhatsApp group. From there, it grew into an organization devoted to sounding the alarm about extreme weather and climate change.

Peeters, who took part in the panel discussion on Dec. 4, told her audience that science is on the side of weather presenters who are willing to engage the public about emerging dangers associated with climate change that’s already in motion.

“TV weather presenters are seen as a trusted source,” she said. “We are backed up by science, and this is the basis of our communications.”

The weather forecasters who helped found Climate Without Borders have the ability to reach about 375,000,000 people, according to the group’s website.

The Daily Signal asked Peeters during the question-and-answer session whether she had any reaction to the so-called “yellow vest” protests that first erupted in Paris prior to the start of the COP24 meeting. The yellow vest protests are directed at French President Emmanuel Macron’s carbon tax policies, which have raised the cost of fuel across the country.

“I’m in Belgium, so I could see this up close, and it is a tough situation,” she said. “It can be a challenge to reach people, but that’s what we are trying to do as weather presenters. We are trying to be climate communicators.”

The aim of Climate Without Borders is mostly to try to identify and communicate what the problem is, rather than advancing specific policy proposals, Chi-Ming Peng, a weather presenter from Taiwan, explained during the panel.

Jaroslaw Kret, a weather presenter in Poland, discussed the challenges of communicating with different audiences.

“Some countries have more ‘deniers.’ Some countries have less ‘deniers,’” he said. “Some countries are more educated. Some countries are less educated.”

COP24 participants were widely critical of President Donald Trump and his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which was negotiated at the COP21 meeting in Paris and adopted in December 2015.

Trump critics in attendance included the U.S. Climate Action Center, which operates under the #WeAreStillIn hashtag that was prominently displayed in the COP24 exhibit hall. The center draws from a coalition of cities, counties, tribes, faith groups, and colleges and universities that support the Paris Agreement, which calls on participating countries to curb their carbon emissions.

But Craig Rucker, the president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a nonprofit based in Washington that favors free-market solutions to energy policy, told The Daily Signal that Trump “made the right call” in withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.

He also pointed to updated scientific research from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change challenging the findings of the U.N. report, which was released at a media event in Katowice during the COP24 conference.

“The only consensus on climate change that exists is among those in the ‘climate alarmism’ movement,” Rucker said. “There are a growing number of scientists from across the global who point to natural influences as what drives climate, and not human activity.

“The policies that the U.N. is pushing in the name of climate change would be very harmful to average people. That much is made evident by the protests in France,” he added.

Marc Morano, publisher of the Climate Depot website, a project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, called on Poland and other countries to follow Trump’s lead and withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

“Poland should get out of this treaty and stand up to the United Nations and the European Union,” Morano said in an interview. “Poland could start a movement that begins to unravel this treaty, which will do nothing for the climate, while raising energy prices across the board.”

Morano, the author of the “Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” described Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement as a form of “daring diplomacy” that should be emulated.

The Daily Signal contacted the media spokesperson for the COP24 presidency seeking comment on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change’s report and the position of U.S. climate change skeptics but did not receive a response.

In many respects, climate skeptics operate at a disadvantage, Rucker said, because they are up against the media, Hollywood, and a public education system that advance what he calls “alarmist theories” on climate.

Although 195 countries that are parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted the language of the climate change agreement during the December 2015 COP21 meeting in Paris, the agreement has not been fully implemented.

At the conclusion of the COP24 meeting, almost 200 countries agreed on a rulebook for curtailing global warming that would lead to full implementation of the agreement.

Chile is set to host the COP25 meeting in late 2019. Brazil had initially been selected as the host country, but incoming President Jair Bolsonaro has said he may withdraw his country from the Paris Agreement.

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2018 The First Year Ever With No Violent Tornadoes In The US

Despite dire predictions of a necessary increase in severe weather events due to climate change, 2018 is poised to become the first year on record with no violent tornadoes in the United States, the Washington Post reported.

According to Post weather writer Ian Livingston, while record-breaking, 2018 is not altogether exceptional, since “there have been downtrends in violent tornado numbers both across the entire modern period and when looking at just the period since Doppler radar was fully implemented across the country in the mid-1990s.”

The year will not only set a record for zero “violent” tornadoes — those ranked EF4 or EF5 on a 5-point scale — but will likely also set a record for the fewest “intense” tornadoes (F/EF3+). With just three days to go, 2018 has seen only 12 intense tornadoes in the U.S., three fewer than the record-holding year of 1987, which had 15.

Unsurprisingly, the number of tornado deaths in 2018 is also remarkably low at ten and could also turn out to be a record.

Climate alarmists will have to scramble to explain to the public how the declining number of intense tornadoes is really caused by global warming, which they will undoubtedly do.

In past years, everything from cold winters to warm summers was blamed on climate change — everyone’s favorite whipping boy — and this latest phenomenon should prove no different.

In 2015, Susan Rice suggested that climate change was partially responsible for the war in Syria and Venezuelan Vice President Jorge Arreaza blamed government-imposed energy rations on climate change as well.

In 2017, extremely cold temperatures in vineyards of western New York state were attributed to climate change, while in 2018 Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration argued that “climate change” is the driving force behind the massacre of thousands of predominantly Christian farmers at the hands of Fulani herdsmen.

In September, climate prophet Al Gore told fans in San Francisco that watching the nightly news “is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation” as severe climate events become a daily affair.

Not to be outdone, California Gov. Jerry Brown, an “evangelist” for global warming, blamed climate change for California wildfires, adding that climate skeptics were responsible for the deaths of California residents.

“Managing the forests in every way we can does not stop climate change,” he said. “And those who deny that are definitely contributing to the tragedies that we’re now witnessing, and will continue to witness in the coming years.”

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Australia, get ready to sweat your way through the weekend as extreme heatwave sets in

"Extreme heatwave"??? This is utter BS.  The BoM have been pushing out these warnings for most of December but all we are having is a normal summer.  The normal mid-afternoon summer temperature where I live in Brisbane is 34C and we are not even up to that.  It is 31C at the time of writing at 3pm on Saturday 29th.


Australia will experience a sweltering close to the year, with temperatures soaring above 40C throughout the nation over the coming days.

The post-Christmas heatwave shows no signs of easing, with warnings in place across parts of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.

If the heat’s getting you down, we have some bad news: the relief could be more than a week away.

“We’re in the middle of a heatwave at the moment in much of Australia,” Sky News’ Chief Meteorologist Tom Saunders told news.com.au. “Today is day five of the heatwave and there’s no sign of a cool change before New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Day will be day nine of that heatwave.

“We won’t see a cool change until the middle of next week — it could be after that or another full week.”

Severe to extreme heat conditions are expected to extend through South Australia, as well as southeast NSW, eastern Victoria and parts of central Queensland.

Up to 70 per cent of NSW will experience high fire dangers, from the southern half of the state up to the Queensland border.

The Bureau of Meteorology has also issued strong wind warnings from the Batemans Coast up to the Macquarie region over the next two days.

Sydneysiders may as well camp out on the beach over the next few days, with tops of 30C today, 31C on Saturday and 34C on Sunday.

The city’s Greater Western region is in for an even more brutal time, with tops of 42C in Penrith tomorrow and 41C on Sunday.

Brisbane will see tops of 30C over the weekend, with very little chance of rain — which means it’s the ideal time to head to the water.

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