New study warns loss of up to two-thirds of Himalaya’s glaciers

Another "Report".  I can tell you what a "report" is.  It is a piece of research that is too sloppy to get into any academic journal.  In this case however the "report" is a 600 page free book:  The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment.  I have had a look at it and it is mostly prophecy based on conventional Warmist assumptions but there is one chapter (3) which offers actual evidence for warming in the region. It talks of "rapid warming" but when we drill down to the figures we find that:

"The number of cold nights reduced by 1 night per decade and the number of cold days reduced by 0.5 days per decade"

Wow! is all I can say.  It looks like warming in the Himalayas is even more trivial than in the globe as a whole.  Move along, people, nothing to see here.  I know I am wasting my time reading all this Warmist crap but someone with a functioning brain has got to do it


Two-thirds of Himalayan glaciers, the world’s “Third Pole”, could melt by 2100 if global emissions are not reduced, scientists warned in a major new study.

And even if the “most ambitious” Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is achieved, one-third of the glaciers would go, according to the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment.

Glaciers in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) region are a critical water source for some 250 million people in the mountains as well as to 1.65 billion others in the river valleys below, the report said.

The glaciers feed 10 of the world’s most important river systems, including the Ganges, Indus, Yellow, Mekong and Irrawaddy, and directly or indirectly supply billions of people with food, energy, clean air and income.

Impacts on people from their melting will range from worsened air pollution to more extreme weather, while lower pre-monsoon river flows will throw urban water systems and food and energy production off-kilter, the study warned.

As the glaciers shrink, hundreds of risky glacial lakes that could burst and unleash floods have formed in the foothills of the mountains, which include giants such as Everest and K2.

The new report was published by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Nepal, one of eight countries on the front line.

Five years in the making, it involved more than 350 researchers and policy experts, 185 organisations, 210 authors, 20 review editors and 125 external reviewers.

“Global warming is on track to transform the frigid, glacier-covered mountain peaks... cutting across eight countries to bare rocks in a little less than a century,” Philippus Wester of ICIMOD, who led the report, said in a statement.

“This is the climate crisis you haven’t heard of,” he added.

SOURCE





Rep. Tlaib Promotes Using Eminent Domain to Seize GM Property to Create ‘Green New Deal’

On Friday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) promoted and quoted a video calling for the government to use eminent domain to seize plants closed by companies like General Motors (GM) – and use those plants to create Tlaib’s “Green New Deal.”

Tlaib tweeted a new video created by Greater Detroit Democratic Socialists of America, “Make the Green New Deal a Reality,” quoting its last line advocating using government to “take control” of corporate production capacity:

"Either we can continue to let corporations, who treat our communities and workers like disposable resources, dictate our fate, or we can take control of our situation, and use our productive capacity to address our common crisis.#GreenNewDeal"

If a company like GM closes a plant, the government should “use eminent domain to take it back and use it for the people,” the video argues:

“If companies, like General Motors, won’t keep their plants open, even after accepting massive, public-funded bailouts, let’s take them back and use them to make the Green New Deal a reality.

“After all, GM used eminent domain in the 80’s to destroy a low-income neighborhood in Hamtramck. If they can destroy an entire community to build a plant, only to abandon it later, why can’t we use eminent domain to take it back and use it for the people?

“We have the ability. Now, all we need is the public will.”

The video advocates seizing property from profit-hungry corporations to create “engines of the Green New Deal”:

“What was once used to generate corporate profit can now be used, not only to create good union jobs, but also to build the sustainable energy future we so desperately need.” ... “We only need the political will to convert these abandoned plants into the engines of the green new deal.”

A full transcript of the video’s closing call for using eminent domain to take corporate property is below:

Generations have been lost to poverty, with little hope for the future, and an ecological nightmare threatens life as we know it.

Yet, there is a silver lining in this tragedy. Through this abandonment, we have inherited a massive amount of used industrial capacity. What was once used to generate corporate profit can now be used, not only to create good union jobs, but also to build the sustainable energy future we so desperately need.

This is an unparalleled opportunity that combines both our proven potential for massive industrial output along with the urgent need for a new, green infrastructure to halt the climate crisis. This could be a historic victory for both economic justice and ecological sanity.

We only need the political will to convert these abandoned plants into the engines of the green new deal.

If companies, like General Motors, won’t keep their plants open, even after accepting massive, public-funded bailouts, let’s take them back and use them to make the Green New Deal a reality.

After all, GM used eminent domain in the 80’s to destroy a low-income neighborhood in Hamtramck. If they can destroy an entire community to build a plant, only to abandon it later, why can’t we use eminent domain to take it back and use it for the people?

We have the ability. Now, all we need is the public will.

Either we can continue to let corporations, who treat our communities and workers like disposable resources, dictate our fate, or we can take control of our situation, and use our productive capacity to address our common crisis.

SOURCE





Columbus Caused Climate Change?

Christopher Columbus started the Little Ice Age! That’s right — not only was that Genoese devil responsible for unleashing the scourge of Europeans upon the Americas, but now, according to a recent study released by researchers at University College London (UCL), he was also responsible for causing climate change.

You see, Columbus’s discovery of the New World brought disease from Europe that unleashed a genocide upon millions of Indigenous Peoples™ whose disappearance subsequently resulted in a massive overgrowth of vegetation across previously farmed land in Central, South, and North America. This surge in forestation tanked global CO2 levels, which in turn cooled the planet and threw it into a mini ice age.

Evidently, it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution, with its massive increase in the burning of fossil fuels, that enough CO2 was produced to reverse the cooling trend.

Now that pesky fact often cited by skeptics of the dogma of anthropogenic climate change — that the 17th century’s Little Ice Age was caused by natural forces rather than human activity — can finally be refuted. In fact, it can now be argued that mankind was actually entirely responsible for causing the Little Ice Age as well as this current global-warming phenomenon.

Not only that, but it can be concluded that Europeans (white people) are most responsible for causing climate change. UCL geography professor Mark Maslin argued, “The really weird thing is, the depopulation of the Americas may have inadvertently allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. It also allowed for the Industrial Revolution and for Europeans to continue the domination.” Check and mate! How’s that for killing two birds with one stone? Oh, wait — that analogy is no longer PC. It’s feeding two birds with one scone.

Never mind the fact that during the era known as the Little Ice Age, the sun was in the Maunder Minimum, a period of 28 years in which fewer than 50 sunspots were observed. Contrast that with the modern era, when there have been between 40,000 and 50,000 sunspots. To be clear, correlation does not prove causation, but it does raise the question. And it’s a far more scientifically plausible theory than blaming Columbus and his crew of Europeans for climate change.

SOURCE





The Three Major Problems with a Carbon Tax

When it comes to energy policy, Washington has one resource that appears infinitely renewable: carbon-tax proposals.

Al Gore proposed a carbon tax back in 1992. The Clinton administration tried, and failed, to impose a “Btu” tax on all forms of energy. The latest iteration of the carbon tax is the “carbon dividend” plan, which was endorsed last month by a group of Nobel-winning economists, chairs of the Federal Reserve, and two former Treasury secretaries.

Proponents claim that a carbon tax would be the most cost-effective way to cut carbon-dioxide emissions. But the carbon tax keeps running aground. There are three big problems with the concept: It would disproportionately hurt low-income consumers, it would inevitably be watered down by special interests, and it would have to be imposed on our trading partners.

* The regressive effects are well known. Even if, as many proponents suggest, the proceeds of the tax were paid out to consumers on a quarterly basis rather than being used to fund the government, having to wait months to recover the extra money they’ve spent could cause financial stress for poor and working-class families.

A 2012 study by scholars from the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute found that the carbon-tax burden “would comprise 3.5 percent of the income of the poorest decile of households and only 0.6 percent of the income of the highest decile.” For low-income workers, particularly those living paycheck to paycheck, such a tax — which would mean higher prices for nearly everything — would impose a major burden. Higher energy prices would be particularly burdensome, and the payments less likely to fully cover the costs, for workers and tradesmen who live in rural areas and must drive long distances to get to and from their job sites.

* Second, a carbon tax would be targeted by armies of lobbyists, with some aiming to kill it and others aiming to get a dispensation. In 1993, the Washington Post reported that the Clinton administration was abandoning the Btu tax because it had underestimated “the opposition the tax would face from manufacturers, farmers and the energy industry.” Last November, voters in Washington State defeated a carbon-tax proposal known as Initiative 1631 by a wide margin. That tax would have exempted aviation and maritime fuel, as well as “energy intensive, trade-dependent” businesses such as steel plants, aluminum producers, and pulp and paper mills.

* The stickiest problem with the carbon tax is the problem of “border carbon adjustments,” which is another name for the tariffs that would be imposed on imported goods and services. Such tariffs will be needed, supporters say, to prevent “carbon leakage” (i.e., carbon-intensive manufacturing moving overseas) and “enhance the competitiveness of American firms that are more energy-efficient than their global competitors.” That border adjustment would require calculating the greenhouse-gas footprint of nearly every single thing we import. Imagine what it might mean for a big manufacturer like Boeing, which produces airplanes with parts that are manufactured and imported from multiple countries. Some of those parts are themselves made from parts and commodities imported from still other countries. Keeping track of all of those carbon flows, and avoiding constant disputes over the accuracy of the data, will be an accounting nightmare.

In addition to determining the right level of tariff, a carbon tax must overcome the “free-rider” problem. William Nordhaus, an economics professor at Yale University who won the Nobel Prize in economics last year for his work on climate-change policy, is a long-time advocate for a carbon tax. Nordhaus has underscored the “importance of near-universal participation in programs to reduce greenhouse gases.” In 2007, he estimated that if only half of the world’s countries agreed to participate in a carbon-tax effort, there would be an “abatement cost penalty of 250 percent.” In other words, the countries that have imposed the carbon tax will have to more than double their carbon-tax rates in order to compensate for the free-riding countries.

Moreover, rich and poor countries alike have consistently prioritized economic growth over substantive action on climate change. University of Colorado professor and author Roger Pielke Jr. has dubbed this the Iron Law of Climate Policy: “When policies on emissions reductions collide with policies focused on economic growth, economic growth will win out every time.” It will be especially difficult for the U.S. to get poorer countries to jump on the carbon-tax bandwagon, seeing as the average American uses five times as much electricity as the average Brazilian, ten times as much as the average Iraqi, and 16 times as much as the average Indian.

The history of international efforts to ban land mines shows how difficult it will be to impose a worldwide carbon tax. Land mines are ghastly weapons that seldom hit their intended targets. Nearly 90 percent of the people who are killed or maimed by them are civilians. All around the world, large swaths of usable land have been declared off limits to farming and human use owing to the danger of abandoned, unexploded land mines.

The effort to ban land mines has garnered widespread support. According to the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, 164 countries have signed the Mine Ban Treaty, which was first adopted in 1997, the same year that the Kyoto Protocol was signed. But just as the Kyoto Protocol hasn’t had much success in limiting greenhouse-gas emissions, 32 countries still haven’t signed the mine-ban treaty, including the United States, China, India, and Russia. Thus, despite universal agreement on the awfulness of land mines, and decades of concerted effort, there is still no worldwide agreement to ban them.

If we can’t get an agreement to ban land mines, how will we ever get an enforceable international agreement to tax coal, oil, and natural gas, which together currently provide 85 percent of the world’s energy?

Proponents claim carbon taxes are essential in the fight against climate change. That may be true. But my guess is that we will see a universal agreement to ban land mines before we see a substantial levy imposed on the fuels that drive the global economy.

SOURCE






UN to be told: stop fighting Australian Coal mine

Australia will formally reject the UN’s intervention over the Adani coalmine, accusing it of blindly accepting ­inaccurate claims of green activists and dismissing the majority support of indigenous landholders.

After lobbying by US law firm Earth Justice, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination last year publicly urged the Morrison government to suspend the Carmichael project as it had not been approved by “all native title claimants”.

Resources Minister Matt Cana­van yesterday said the Morrison government would write to the UN committee to formally correct the “clear errors” in its understanding of Australian law.

Senator Canavan said the UN had accepted incorrect claims that 2017 legislation enshrining majority rule within indigenous groups when considering land-use agreements was designed to undermine land rights.

He said the amendments, which followed the Federal Court’s McGlade ruling, had been widely backed by individual indigenous groups, the representative Native Title Council and Labor.

“They insinuated that these changes were effectively made to limit indigenous rights or somehow advantage this evil Adani project. This is just a massive misunderstanding of what happened,” Senator Canavan said.

“They were done after significant consultation with those groups and with the national ­Native Title Council.

“They helped protect over 200 indigenous land-use agreements which provide benefits to indigenous people which would have been put at risk without the agreements.”

The committee said it was “particularly concerned” by the 2017 law, derided by activists as the “Adani amendment”, to ­ensure indigenous land-use agreements needed only majority support among traditional owners. In Adani’s case, the indigenous land-use agreement with the Wangan and Jagalingou people was endorsed by 294 of 295 clan members in a 2016 ballot, after years of consultation with the ­Indian company.

Queensland’s Labor government is holding up the Adani project over the company’s plan to manage the area’s population of black-throated finches.

The government has received an independent review of the plan by environmental scientist Brendan Wintle, but last night missed Adani’s 5pm deadline to deliver the report.

Adani has accused the government of “shifting the goalposts” on its project, while the Liberal National Party said Labor was delaying the final go-ahead to prevent the issue becoming a distraction for Bill Shorten ahead of the federal election due in May.

Labor backed the native title amendment after a court judgment added a “high degree of uncertainty” by requiring votes approving land-use agreement to be carried unanimously.

Senator Canavan suggested the committee do its own ­research.

“International organisations seem to take as given claims made by vested interests in the big environmental movement,” he said.

The W&J Family Council — a minority group of traditional owners opposed to the mine — has criticised the legal change as an “Adani amendment” designed specifically to prop-up the “dodgy” land-use deal, which includes $250 million of economic opportunities.

However, traditional owners last week wrote to the UN insisting that the majority of clan members still supported the agreement with Adani.

SOURCE

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