3.2 BILLION people will have a shortage of drinking water by 2050: Study warns that climate change will cause supplies to decrease by 60%

This the usual crazy logic we get from Warmists.  Global warming would produce MORE rain not less.  Warmed oceans would evaporate off more which would come down as rain.

And capitalism is the solution to water shortage, anyway.  Israel once had a severe water shortage, being a basically desert climate at the end of the Jordan river, which loses a lot of water upstream.

So they now simply desalinate as much ocean water as they need.  It costs a bit but not a lot in an advanced market-oriented economy


According to a new UN report, because of climate change, the number of people living in places with insufficient water will go from 1.9 billion to 3.2 billion by 2050

The fact that the past decade has been the warmest on record bears 'a clear fingerprint' of climate change, said the World Meteorological Organization, which just released United in Science 2020, a multi-department assessment of the latest climate science data.

Admitting 2020 was an 'unprecedented' year, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that climate disruption was continuing unabated, with 'record heat, ice loss, wildfires, floods and droughts.'

Glacier runoff, which provides water to hundreds of millions of people, is expected to max out globally by the end of the century. Some glaciers have reported losing 14 inches of mass a year since 2012

The United in Science report indicated that climate change 'is often felt through water-related hazards, like drought or flooding.'

Warmer temperatures have led to reductions in the world's glaciers and ice sheets, which threatens the supply of fresh water.

Glacier runoff, which provides potable drinking water, is expected to peak globally by the end of the century and then decline.

Some areas, like Central Europe and the Caucasus region, are already at the tipping point.

In the last decade, 1.9 billion people lived in places with insufficient water. According to the report, that number will explode to 3.2 billion by 2050.

Water scarcity is becoming an increasingly important metric in determining a country's creditworthiness, or sovereign rating, according to analysts.

That's putting more pressure on countries to face up to climate change.

'While disruptions from climate change are likely to manifest themselves only gradually over the coming decades, water risks already materialize on a sufficiently regular basis and large scale,' said Fitch Ratings analysts' Mahmoud Harb and Kathleen Chen.

According to the World Bank, some countries' gross domestic product could drop as much as 6 percent over the next 30 years as a result of water woes.

Middle Eastern nations like Kuwait and Egypt are the most exposed to water stress and drought risk, Bloomberg reports.

On the other side of the scale, climate change is also fueling flooding.

According to data from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sea levels will rise by more than three feet in the next eight decades.

SOURCE





Free speech, fake science - and why we must take the fight to the climate zealots

By DOMINIC LAWSON

As I write this column, I do so without knowing if all those who regularly purchase the Daily Mail from their newsagents will be allowed to buy the edition in which it appears.

That infringement of their — your — liberty is the purpose of Extinction Rebellion, a small-ish but increasingly influential group of middle-class climate change protesters who want to silence anyone or any organisation that doesn't share their hysterical view that the planet and its inhabitants will fry to fossil-fuelled extinction within a decade or two unless we return immediately to a form of pre-industrial subsistence.

That, ostensibly, is why they had been blockading the print sites of most of our national newspapers.

Their belief is not based on science but is quasi-religious: they regard any provider of information which does not conform to their strictures as wicked and to be silenced (if they refuse to be converted), rather in the same way that the Spanish Inquisition treated heretics.

One of its founders and still an active member, Roger Hallam, went even further, declaring that 'maybe we should put a bullet in the head' as 'punishment' for those he deems responsible for this alleged impending planetary extinction.

Intimidate

Although it was the bulk of the newspaper industry that his group has been attempting to intimidate and shut down this weekend, last year it tried something similar with the BBC, massing outside New Broadcasting House, preventing many of the corporation's journalists from getting in, while holding up banners with the slogan 'BBC, your silence is deadly'.

In fact it is Extinction Rebellion which wishes to silence voices it disapproves of; and it was almost comical that it should have targeted the national broadcaster, which has itself taken the decision not to allow airtime to anyone who questions the idea that man-made climate change is the biggest global threat to human health (although the coronavirus pandemic might have caused some inside that organisation to wonder belatedly whether in fact disease might be the true villain).

Sir David Attenborough, still vigorous well into his 90s, is the cutting edge of that BBC campaign. He has declared that 'we cannot be radical enough' in our policies to reduce CO2 emissions.

It is even more fabulously ironic that the issue of The Sun newspaper which the Extinction Rebellion blockaders on Friday night fought to prevent reaching the public contained an adoring interview with Sir David about 'the climate crisis'.

In it, he told his interviewer: 'We are damaging the environment just by sitting here breathing. The carbon dioxide going out of this window as a consequence of meeting here is quite significant.'

I would have been tempted to reply: 'Don't be silly, Sir David; it isn't.' But the nation's favourite presenter of once ideology-free wildlife documentaries was, as always, treated with uncritical deference.

In a way, the same unwillingness to debate has been both the media's — and the politicians' — approach to Extinction Rebellion and its spiritual leader, the precocious Swede Greta Thunberg.

Yes, the Press is now defending itself robustly against XR's physical attempts to silence it, yet there has been a peculiar reluctance to challenge the protest group's claims forensically. Peculiar, because it is not just that their methods are objectionable: so are their arguments.

Perhaps the only time this happened (at least on the BBC) was when Andrew Neil, during XR's tedious onslaught last year on those attempting to get to work in London, interviewed the movement's then spokeswoman, Zion Lights.

Neil asked her to give the scientific basis for her claims that 'our children are going to die in the next ten to 20 years'. After some confused waffle, she responded: 'The overall issue is that the deaths are going to happen' — which did not get us much further.

She seemed even more at a loss when Neil responded to her insistence that 'billions of people will die [as a result of climate change] over the next few decades': 'I looked through the report of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and there is no reference to anything of the sort.'

Alas, the BBC have since parted company with Mr Neil, whose critical approach to this matter is not their house style.

As for Ms Lights, she has since left XR … to become an advocate of nuclear power.

Delusion

In a brave article, she said that she had become aware that this country (or any other developed nation) could not abandon fossil fuels and still keep the lights on without rapid development of nuclear power — the only reliable way of mass-producing energy without emitting CO2.

No amount of wind or solar energy installations can produce energy 24 hours a day, or in absolutely reliable quantities: they are inherently intermittent in their production.

As the late chief scientific adviser to the Government, Professor Sir David MacKay, said a week before he died in 2016: 'Because my time is thinner and thinner, I should call a spade a spade…

'There is this appalling delusion people have that we can take this thing [renewables] and we can just scale it up, and if there is a slight issue of it not adding up, then we can just do energy efficiency. Humanity really does need to pay attention to arithmetic and the laws of physics.'

Yet the XR lot regard nuclear power as satanic, not just because of its former connection with weapons production, but also because they shun anything which doesn't seem to them 'natural'.

It seems they would rather mankind died of hunger naturally, than prospered through technological and industrial processes. Or, rather, they take prosperity for granted, without understanding how it was created (perhaps because the great majority of them seem to come from homes which have never known poverty).

Yet our politicians seem cut from the same cloth. When Greta Thunberg came to the UK in April last year, they queued up to praise her and her arguments, which are indistinguishable from those of XR.

Speaking alongside her in parliament, the then Environment Secretary Michael Gove said: 'We have not done nearly enough. Greta, you have been heard.'

Scared

Indeed, two months later, the Government legislated to make the UK 'net zero carbon by 2050' — admittedly 25 years later than XR's impossible demand. But it had no idea how much this would cost, or how it would be done.

The New Zealand government did carry out such an exercise, and concluded that to achieve 'net zero' by 2050 would cost 16 per cent of GDP annually. This would equate to £560 billion a year if applied to the UK — equivalent to almost three-quarters of all public expenditure.

Yet this legislation was passed without even a debate, let alone a vote in the House of Commons: it was enacted through a statutory instrument. This could only happen because the overwhelming majority of MPs are too scared to be seen as so-called 'climate change deniers'.

And they absolutely refuse to engage with such rigorous thinkers as Bjorn Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre think-tank, or Michael Shellenberger (named as a 'hero of the environment' by Time Magazine in 2008), both of whom argue that grotesquely excessive resources are being ineffectually dedicated to 'preventing' climate change.

So Bjorn Lomborg's latest book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts The Poor, And Fails To Fix The Planet, has been almost entirely ignored in the British media (forget about any BBC interviews with Lomborg).

And I believe the Daily Mail is the only British newspaper which has given much space to Shellenberger's new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All — perhaps the most pertinent of his points being that to move to 100 per cent renewables 'would require increasing the proportion of land used for energy from today's 0.5 per cent to 50 per cent'.

The fact that the British political establishment — and the bulk of the media — have ceased even to engage in this debate, on an intellectual level, has left the ground free for Extinction Rebellion to occupy. Really, they didn't need to try to silence the Press. The intimidation and groupthink has done its work quite thoroughly already.

SOURCE





From Nixon to Trump: EPA Chief Touts Environmental Gains, Hits ‘Single Issue Advocacy’

Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, the government has reduced air pollution by 7%, declared Superfund sites safe again at a record pace, and directed tens of billions of dollars to ensuring clean water, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler said Thursday in a speech marking the agency’s 50th anniversary.

Wheeler, speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, drew a sharp contrast between the Trump administration’s environmental achievements and the “poor choices” made by some policymakers at the state level.

“Here in California, where the modern environmental movement began—and from where President Nixon brought it to the rest of the country—it’s important to acknowledge the role states have in being laboratories for democracy, and in this case, laboratories for environmental policy,” Wheeler said.

“But for environmental policy to work nationally, the federal government and states must work together as partners, not as adversaries,” the Environmental Protection Agency administrator added.

Wheeler was particularly critical of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, and other East Coast governors for impeding construction of natural gas pipelines.

New England states now must import natural gas from Russia, Wheeler said, because Cuomo has stood in the way of pipelines that could have transported gas supplies from Pennsylvania.

The EPA chief also called attention to “rolling blackouts” in California and the public policy hostile to natural gas power plants that he said led to those blackouts.

‘A New Vision’

President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and the agency officially will celebrate its 50th anniversary later this year.

Congress also passed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act during Nixon’s first term from 1969 through 1972.

Wheeler, who became acting EPA administrator in November 2018 after the resignation of Scott Pruitt, won Senate confirmation to the post in February 2019.

In his speech at the Nixon Library, Wheeler stressed the need for cooperation between the federal government and state governments rather than animosity.

“To do this involves a new vision,” he said, “and for a country searching for a new consensus on the environment as well as on many other things, this can seem tough. But I believe we can find a new consensus, if we strive to.”

Wheeler highlighted several areas where he said the Trump administration had made significant environmental progress that  largely went unheralded in the media.

“During the first three years of the Trump administration, air pollution in this country fell 7%,” he said. “Last year, EPA delisted 27 Superfund sites, the most in a single year since 2001. And agency programs have contributed more than $40 billion dollars to clean water infrastructure investment during President Trump’s first term.”

But  the EPA administrator also lamented the emergence of “single issue advocacy,” often focused on climate change, that has disrupted a broad, bipartisan consensus on environmental policy in line with Nixon’s vision that made legislation such as the Clear Air Act and Clean Water Act possible:

Unfortunately, in the past decade or so, some members of former administrations and progressives in Congress have elevated single issue advocacy—in many cases focused just on climate change—to virtue-signal to foreign capitals, over the interests of communities within their own country. Communities deserve better than this, but in the recent past, EPA has forgotten important parts of its mission. It’s my belief that we misdirect a lot of resources that could be better used to help communities across this country.

Wheeler also said that climate change policies pursued at the state level often are detrimental to the environment and the economy.

Although Cuomo has moved to block pipelines that would transport natural gas from Pennsylvania to New York and New England “in the name of climate change,” Wheeler told his audience, the carbon footprint of natural gas pipelines is much smaller than what it takes to transport gas supplies across the ocean from Russia and other parts of Europe.

The environmental problems with Cuomo’s anti-pipeline stance don’t end there, he said.

“These poor choices subject Americans to imports of gas from places like Russia, even in the face of evidence that U.S. natural gas has a much cleaner emissions profile than imported gas from Europe,” Wheeler said.

And in the absence of pipelines, citizens in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine must “use more polluting wood and heating oil to heat their homes because of gas shortages in the winter months, which in turn creates very poor local air quality,” he said.

The EPA administrator cited California as an example where environmental policies don’t produce good environmental outcomes. He also cautioned policymakers to refrain from becoming overly reliant on renewable energy during periods that demand reliable energy:

It should go without saying that dumping sewage into San Francisco Bay without disinfection, indeed without any chemical or biological treatment, is a bad idea, but that’s what’s been happening for many years, against federal law. And just last month, the rolling blackouts created by California’s latest electricity crisis—the result of policies against power plants being fueled by natural gas—spilled 50,000 gallons of raw sewage into the Oakland Estuary when back-up wastewater pumps failed.

Wheeler expressed concern that “environmental accidents will happen more often” if state policymakers persist in pushing “more renewables onto the grid at times of the day when renewables aren’t available.”

5 New ‘Pillars’

Looking ahead, Wheeler said the Trump administration intends to focus on “community-driven environmentalism” that promotes revitalization efforts, “meeting the 21st-century demands for water,” “reimagining the Superfund program as a project-oriented program,” “reforming the permitting process to empower states,” and “creating a holistic pesticide program for the future.”

The Superfund program dates to 1980, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act. The law provided funds for cleaning up thousands of sites across the country laced with contaminants such as lead, asbestos, and dioxin-infused soil as well as radiation.

Superfund sites include “manufacturing facilities, processing plants, landfills and mining sites,” according to the EPA website.

During his speech, Wheeler said about 16% of the U.S. population, or slightly more than 50 million Americans, lives within 3 miles of a Superfund site.

Although in the past the EPA “allowed litigation and bureaucracy to dictate the pace of Superfund projects, instead of focusing on improving environmental indicators and moving sites to completion,” Wheeler said, he sees an opportunity to “reimagine” the program by implementing the recommendations of the 2018 Superfund Task Force.

Going forward, Wheeler said, the federal government and states should collaborate rather than operate as adversaries. He expressed some confidence that policymakers can reach a new consensus on environmental questions.

“We are a nation made up of communities, and communities are the foundation of this nation, not the other way around,” the EPA chief said. “If we can do the work before us—break down the silos between us as an agency and elsewhere—I believe we can both protect the places we love and bring back the places that have been hurt by pollution and make them even better than they were before.”

SOURCE




Australia: Miner launches own rail company to haul coal from Carmichael mine

The Adani group has launched its own rail business to haul coal to its Queensland port, while avoiding any public mention of the parent company or the controversial Carmichael mine.

It follows years of pressure from anti-coal activists that has prompted a string of potential Adani contractors to walk away from the mining giant, increasing the cost of doing business.

Adani's apparent move to go it alone on coal haulage will add $200 million to the upfront cost of its Queensland project, according to one energy analyst.

Bowen Rail Company (BRC) last month announced it was launching a haulage business to service Abbot Point export terminal.

Head of project delivery, David Wassell, said the company had bought its own "state-of-the-art locomotives and rollingstock" and would recruit about 50 workers.

Neither the media release nor the company website mention Adani or the Carmichael mine.

But company searches show BRC is owned by an Adani group company in India, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited, via two holding companies in Singapore.

The searches show the directors of BRC are all senior Adani staff in Australia.

They are Adani Australia chief executive Jeyakumar Janakaraj, Adani Enterprises infrastructure chief executive Trista Brohier, Adani Australia executive director Samir Vora and Adani Abbot Point Operations finance manager Damien Dederer.

Staff biographies on the BRC website exclude their work history with Adani.

Mr Wassell's biography states that, "prior to joining Bowen Rail Company, David held the position of national supply chain development manager at ASCIANO".

But his LinkedIn profile said between BRC and ASCIANO, he worked for three years as Adani Australia's manager of rail operations.

The LinkedIn profiles of two other BRC staff state they work at Adani Australia, the proponent of the Carmichael mine.

Adani Australia is owned by Indian-based Adani Enterprises Limited.

The Adani family owns almost 75 per cent of Adani Enterprises and just over 62 per cent of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone.

The ABC last year revealed Adani was snubbed by rail haulage operator, Genesee & Wyoming Australia.

The other two rail operators with capacity to haul Adani's 10 million tonnes of coal a year — Aurizon and Pacific National — have come under activist and shareholder pressure to follow suit.

A spokesman for Aurizon told the ABC it was, "not aware Adani has commenced any commercial process with regard to the tender of above-rail haulage contracts or indeed whether they intend to".

A Queensland Government document showed Adani had applied for accreditation as a rolling stock operator, which was needed to haul coal.

The national rail safety register showed Adani was still waiting for that accreditation.

A spokeswoman for Pacific National did not respond to questions from the ABC.

Adani's current plan hinges on building a 189km rail line from the mine to link to Aurizon's Central Queensland Coal Network running to Abbot Point.

It must reach a separate access agreement with Aurizon, which it reportedly has not yet done.

The Aurizon spokesman said it was legally required to consider all access requests but also to keep them confidential.

Adani had previously planned to build a 388km line to transport up to 30 mega tonnes a year of coal.

But it was forced to scale down its plans after the only contractor it considered capable of building the mine, Downer, walked away after being targeted by protesters.

In a Supreme Court application for an injunction and damages against activist Ben Pennings, a lawyer for Adani said scaling down to 10MT of coal a year, "resulted in an increase to the capital cost per tonne of coal of at least 15 per cent".

Protest pressure puts off contractors

Adani, in its application, said activist pressure has driven up its cost of engaging contractors on two fronts.

Adani has, "not always been able to engage what are known as the 'tier 1' companies or the 'industry leaders'", raising its risks and "substantially" increasing its insurance costs, its lawyer said in an affidavit.

Companies won't do business with Adani unless it enters "cost plus" contracts that force it to cover any "additional costs [that] may be incurred as a result of activist and protester action", he said.

Former Citibank analyst Tim Buckley, now at the pro-renewables Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said Adani's decision drastically increased its capital costs, which other rail operators would have wanted to avoid.

Mr Buckley said locomotives and coal wagons for the mine's first phase of 10MT a year would cost $200 million upfront.

This would rise to half a billion dollars in the mine's second phase of 27MT a year, he said.

The money it saved from not outsourcing would be offset by having to pay $50 million a year in interest, he said.

"Adani is now working to set up a business in direct competition with Aurizon's existing coal rail haulage, to help defray the costs of having to also establish new rail loco and wagon maintenance facilities, an expensive duplication of existing infrastructure," he said.

Pablo Brait, from environmental lobby group Market Forces, said BRC was, "another potential vehicle for the shifting of funds from Adani's India-based companies to its Australian coal project".

This meant Adani group investors who had previously ruled out financing the Australian coal project were now linked to it, and faced renewed pressure by environmental campaigners.

Market Forces has raised the issue with financiers linked to Adani Ports.

Adani Ports' biggest bondholder, Allianz, has previously ruled out financing or insuring new coal projects.

An Adani Australia spokeswoman said the Carmichael project was "on-track to produce first coal in 2021".

"Discussions that Adani undertakes with third parties on contractual matters are commercial in confidence," she said.

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************