New Climate Summary: Meat, Livestock Have Little Climate Impact

American ranchers and U.S. meat consumption have virtually no impact on greenhouse gas emissions or climate, reports a compelling new climate summary. The new climate summary, “Climate at a Glance: Livestock and Methane,” documents that cattle and beef account for just 2% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. All livestock combined account for less than 4% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate activists, many of whom are vegans for other reasons, often claim that ranchers, livestock, and meat production are a leading cause of rising greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Yet, EPA data show crop production accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than total livestock production.

The Climate at a Glance portal provides more than two dozen concise, compelling summaries of topics related to climate change. Bullet-points at the top of each summary provide an easily understandable summary of the topic. A Short Summary section under the bullet-points provides a concise, supporting explanation with links to scientific evidence. Most summaries also include a compelling visual graphic.

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Banning The Sale Of Combustion Cars Would Be ‘A Colossal Error’

A new paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals another major flaw in plans to electrify the economy.

According to the author, Professor Gautam Kalghatgi, because most vehicles will still run on fossil fuels in ten years’ time, banning the sale of new ones would prevent any improvement in the efficiency of most of the vehicle fleet.

As Professor Kalghatgi explains:

“Even with an improbable hundred-fold increase to 10 million in battery electric vehicle numbers in 2030, 75% of cars will still run on petrol and diesel”, says Professor Kalghatgi.

“But no manufacturer is going to invest in more advanced cars if they are banned from selling them”.

And Professor Kalghatgi says those advances could bring about significant improvements in efficiency:

“If a battery car delivers a 25% saving in greenhouse gas emissions on a life cycle basis, the overall reduction for the UK would be less than 4% by 2030. A larger reduction emissions could be delivered with a 5% improvement in fuel consumption of petrol and diesel vehicles.”

“Banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars simply means abandoning the possibility of future emissions reductions in this sector by freezing the technology of a vast majority of vehicles running U.K. transport for decades to come “.

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Mendacious Media enables climate alarmism

I have been a news junkie since high school. Media bias favoring left-of-center public policies and politicians is nothing new, yet this 40-year-plus reality never gets shopworn.  The flagrancy of skewed news coverage to favor one political agenda and oppose another is worse than ever and still surprises.

There is no shortage of examples of media slant and mendacity, including coronavirus reporting, downplaying the riots in American cities, and peddling the bogus Russia collusion narrative. The climate change issue is another glaring example that goes beyond mere bias. Most media coverage portrays the subject as a singular truth, that is, human exhaling and industry are causing the planet to warm to an imminent doomsday. Typically, no other evidence or viewpoints are acknowledged, much less given credence.

The prevailing media treatment of climate change and other issues exhibits a combination of myopia, laziness, dishonesty and censorship, which CFACT itself has been recipient.  It has gotten so bad, two major media outlets recently were exposed by very public resignations and several newsrooms displayed infantile wokeness.

Chief among this journalistic dereliction is NBC’s Chuck Todd, a wind-up doll for climate credulity and former congressional aide. Todd announced he would give no airtime to skeptics of the prevailing mantra of man-made global warming. No counterpoint allowed is standard for “mainstream” climate reporting.

Time magazine, another substantial media outlet, has long obsessed about the “Endangered Earth,” as far back as the late 1980’s. By then, global warming had replaced the coming-ice-age mantra from the 1970’s. Time’s annual “Person of the Year” was replaced for 1988 as “Planet of the Year.”  Time has been beating the same drum in the 30-plus years since, even as Earth’s environment improved, global poverty declined, and U.S. carbon emissions more recently dropped. No matter, its 2019 “Person of the Year” was the indefatigable and exploited Greta Thunberg.

Media myopia toward climate change issues is so widespread, some younger reporters themselves may not realize it having grown up in the “Captain Planet” generation when Ted Turner’s cartoon began the brainwashing process.

Journalists have long practiced as stenographers for celebrities and politicians who make absurd catastrophic climate assertions. Reporters surely know how pervasive is lying in politics, yet so many accept climate sound-bites without scrutiny.  Has any reporter ever questioned the many preposterous claims by Sen. Bernie Sanders or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?  Has either been asked how cooling the planet by one degree in 30 years would stop icebergs from melting in summer, or how wind and solar can “replace” fossil fuels when they rely on them so extensively? The list goes on.

Now and then there are modest exceptions, as when Foxnews host Chris Wallace interviewed Al Gore in 2017, and pushed back some. Yet, even in that instance, Wallace let pass several ludicrous claims by Gore, including supposed rising sea level from global warming that allegedly resulted in ocean fish on Miami streets.

Part of the problem is that while climate change ideology is now unchallenged dogma among Democratic politicians, few Republicans are willing to go on the record with reporters to counter them beyond complaining about the multi-trillion dollar price tag of the Green New Deal. For such Republicans, the calculation is to avoid controversy, rather than offer perspective on–much less rebut–the underlying assumptions of the climate agenda.

Commonplace in climate reporting is when a new global warming “study” is released with some outlandish prediction in 12 to 80 years that is accepted at face value by reporters.  Regardless of political leanings or personal bias, every journalist should be a skeptic and report both sides since there are numerous scientists on either side of the climate change issue.

Last spring, for example, the journal Nature Climate Change published a whimsical study that claimed half the world’s beaches would disappear by the year 2100 due to climate change. Every media outlet I found which reported on the study parroted its findings, with nary a perfunctory critic to round out the story.

More impactful media negligence has been its reporting on findings of the International Panel on Climate Change. Michael Shellenberger, in his new book, Apocalypse Never, documents how this sensationalist reporting is regularly at variance with the actual IPCC research.

The cumulative effect of years of robotic reporting of man-made global warming trope has contributed to the growth and political power of the climate change industry. If not countered, it will further lead to a misinformed public, and gullible politicians imposing more destructive and wasteful climate policies on the populace in America and worldwide.

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What Global Warming? Snow Line In Alps Increases

It’s been a rather cool summer in much of Europe so far. And just before some hot weather is about to sweep across Central Europe starting tomorrow, winter made a brief comeback – at the peak of summer – in the Alps!

“At high altitudes of the Alps, the precipitation turned into snow overnight,” reported Wetteronline.de here. “In some areas, the snowfall line dropped to an altitude of around 2,300 meters.”

Wetteronline.de also noted that on Germany’s highest mountain, Zugspitze, “about 30 centimeters of fresh snow fell in the morning at minus 2 degrees.”

“Employees of the Zugspitzbahn were in continuous operation to clear paths and the visitor platforms from the summer snow masses.”

DWD national weather service labels a cooler than normal July “quite warm”

Meanwhile, Germany’s DWD national weather service recently issued what I’d call a press release that is designed especially for stupid and lazy journalists who won’t bother fact-checking.

In its preliminary report on July weather in Germany, the DWD announced that the mid-summer month this year was “rather warm.”

According to the DWD, the average temperature in July for Germany was 17.7°C (64°F), which was “0.8°C (1.44°F) above the value for the internationally valid reference period 1961 to 1990.”

But what the DWD fails to tell us is that the 1961-1990 period was a cold one. And not only that, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) no longer uses the 1961-1990 reference period. Instead, it uses the 1981-2010 period to calculate the means.

The DWD does mention that July 2020 was 0.3°C (0.54°F) too cold compared with the valid reference period 1981 to 2010. So at the DWD, 0.3°C below the valid mean is in their eyes “rather warm.”

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