Antarctic Penguin Remains Show Present Temperatures Are Normal

Scientists report they have discovered perfectly preserved, 800-year-old penguin remains exposed by a patch of melting ice along the Antarctic coast. The news media and climate activists are touting this as proof of an unprecedented climate crisis. In reality, the discovery reveals that temperatures in the not-too-distant past were as warm or warmer than present temperatures.

Reporting in the peer-reviewed journal Geology, scientists encountered what appeared to be the fresh remains of Adelie penguins in a region where penguins are not known to live. Carbon dating showed the penguin remains were approximately 800 years old, implying the remains had very recently been exposed by thawing ice. Further examination and testing of the site showed that penguins had colonized and abandoned the site multiple times between 800 and 5,000 years ago.

The scientists noted that the most recent period of penguin colonization began at the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period (approximately 900 A.D.) and ended at the beginning of the Little Ice Age (approximately 1200 A.D.). The scientists noted that penguins currently cannot live in the region because “fast ice” (ice that extends from the Antarctic shore many miles out into the ocean) prevents penguins from accessing the ocean from shore. During the warmth of the Medieval Warm Period, the absence of fast ice allowed penguins to colonize the area.

Further analysis of the site showed penguins were able to live and breed in the region during most of the past 5,000 years. The scientists described the period of greatest colonization as the “Penguin Optimum,” lasting from 2,000 B.C. to the time of Christ. Presumably, it was too warm for fast ice to extend from the Antarctic coast during these periods of penguin colonization.

The news media are proclaiming the newly discovered penguin remains as proof of a climate crisis. The claim is that Antarctic temperatures are warmer than they have been at any point in the past 800 years. See, for example, the UK Independent article titled “Climate crisis: 5,000-year-old penguin graveyard revealed by retreating Antarctic ice.” While that may be so, the more important revelation is that Antarctic temperatures have been warmer than today – warm enough to support large penguin colonies that depend on access to the open sea – for most of the 5,000 years. In other words, human civilization developed and thrived during temperatures that were warmer than today. For most of the past 5,000 years, humans and nature grew accustomed to – and thrived during – temperatures that were warmer than today.

Far from proof of a climate crisis, the new penguin discovery is proof of a return to climate normalcy.

SOURCE

Fracking Takes Center Stage In Debate Over Energy, Climate Change

President Trump and Joseph R. Biden have been talking about fracking on the campaign trail, but it’s about more than hydraulic fracturing. They’re talking about the future of U.S. energy.

The engineering feat that transformed a nation once dependent upon the Middle East into the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas has become shorthand for the debate over whether America continues to ride the fossil fuel wave or shuts it down in the name of climate change.

Making the shale revolution possible was fracking, an extractive technology invented in the 1940s that injects a high-pressure mixture of water, sand, and chemicals into underground rock formations to release the oil and gas embedded within.

“We can’t do it without fracking,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance oil and gas trade association. “Over 90% of the wells in the United States are fracked now. We have very few conventional resources, the Gulf of Mexico being one example. Otherwise, everything has to be fracked.”

With conventional oil fields, such as those in Saudi Arabia, “you poke that straw into the ground and it flows naturally,” she said. “But you poke that straw into the shale because the shale is very nonporous. It won’t flow without fracking.”

As Republicans cheer America’s long-sought energy independence and Democrats and environmental groups seek to move beyond the shale revolution to a green-energy future, hydraulic fracturing has risen to the campaign forefront.

Mr. Trump has embraced fracking. Mr. Biden says he would not ban fracking but would prohibit it on public lands and seek to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, which would mean replacing coal, oil, and natural gas with renewable energy sources, rendering fracking obsolete.

“Nobody’s going to build another coal-fired plant in America. No one’s going to build another oil-fired [plant] in America,” Mr. Biden said at Tuesday’s presidential debate. “They’re going to move to renewable energy.”

Meanwhile, the president has wielded the fracking issue as a cudgel, especially in swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, where hydraulic fracturing in the oil-and-gas rich Marcellus Shale has driven an economic boom.

“Biden reiterated his pledge to require net-zero carbon emissions,” Mr. Trump said at a rally last week in Pittsburgh.

“That’s basically saying, do you know what that is? There’ll be no more oil, there’ll be no more gas, there’ll be no more nothing, there’ll be no more industry, there’ll be no more country. That’s what it’s saying really.

“And that would instantly shut down fracking and mining immediately in Pennsylvania, sending your jobs overseas, sending your money to somebody else, not you.”

Mr. Biden has countered by promising his clean-energy transformation would create millions of jobs with a massive infrastructure overhaul, including retrofitting 4 million buildings, replacing gas-fueled cars with electric vehicles, and ending the electrical grid’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Mr. Biden’s Clean Energy Revolution and Climate Justice plan comes with a price tag of $2 trillion, but he said it would “pay for itself as we move forward.”

“We can get to net zero in terms of energy production by 2035,” Mr. Biden said. “Not only not costing people jobs, [but] creating jobs.”

While Mr. Trump has painted his Democratic opponent’s plan as a radical job-killer, Mr. Biden is a centrist compared with many in his party, including his running mate Sen. Kamala D. Harris, California Democrat, who called during the primary for a fracking ban.

Mr. Biden didn’t help himself during the Democratic primary by muddying his position. In March, he declared “no new fracking,” which his campaign later said referred to new drilling on public lands, but he has since insisted that “I am not banning fracking.”

Democratic strategist Rick Ridder said he believed most voters don’t see Mr. Biden as an anti-fracking kind of guy.

“The Trump campaign is obviously trying to push that Joe Biden is anti-fracking because so many of the other Democratic contenders were opposed to fracking,” Mr. Ridder said. “And so they’re trying to lump them in. But I don’t think they’ve been very successful at that.”

He added that “Joe Biden is perceived by most voters in every focus group I’ve ever done as sort of a moderate Democrat, and so, therefore, suggesting he would ban fracking, they don’t believe it.”

Mr. Biden also faces intense pressure on the left from the environmental movement, starting with San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer, a former Democratic presidential primary candidate and top party fundraiser.

“That’s what Biden’s struggle is: how to worry about jobs in the gas and oil industry in Pennsylvania, and at the same time keep his environmental constituency,” said Floyd Ciruli, director of the University of Denver Crossley Center for Public Opinion Research.

“Tom Steyer is one of his top fundraisers and campaigners, and has been for several months, and so he’s got Steyer right on his shoulder.”

In addition, polls show that voters are split on fracking, even in Pennsylvania. A CBS/YouGov poll released last month showed 52% of Pennsylvania voters oppose fracking and 48% support it. Then again, a Cook Political Report/Kaiser poll taken in November found 57% opposed a fracking ban.

Also fueling the issue’s profile is California, which leads the nation in transitioning to green energy — and was forced in August to implement more power shutdowns as electricity demand exceeded supply.

“You can’t wave a magic wand and say all energy needs to come from wind and solar because then you get California and rolling blackouts,” Ms. Sgamma said. “So I do think people have connected the dots and understand that energy is important, which is why the issue has risen to that level.”

Renewable energy accounts for 19% of electricity production, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

Environmentalists have argued that fracking is unsafe, which the industry denies, and incompatible with the push to lower atmospheric greenhouse gases to avoid a “climate crisis.”

“The corporations that hype fracking are trying to lock us into a dirty future powered by fossil fuels. It’s a future that leads to more gas plants, more leaky pipelines, more compressor stations, more processing plants, and more dangerous storage facilities,” said Food & Water Watch. “We know the only way toward a clean, renewable energy future is to ban fracking and to stop all new fossil fuel development.”

Industry supporters point out that the shale revolution has been credited with reducing U.S. emissions by driving the replacement of coal with natural gas, which emits fewer greenhouse gases, at power plants.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration said Wednesday that U.S. emissions fell by 2.8% in 2019, part of a long-term trend that has seen the nation’s carbon emissions fall by 14.5% since 2007.

Even though the reductions lead the developed world, they are still a far cry from net-zero emissions, which is increasingly the standard championed by Democrats.

The Green New Deal resolution proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls for net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.

The New York Democrat heads the Biden campaign climate task force, leading to speculation that Mr. Biden, if elected, may renege on his promise not to ban fracking under pressure from the left.

“The primaries are over, and right now what is most important is to make sure that we ensure a Democratic victory in November and that we continue to push Vice President Biden on issues from marijuana to climate change to foreign policy,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a Sept. 17 interview with Just the News.

She has co-sponsored the Fracking Ban Act in Congress with Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, but if net-zero becomes the standard, such measures may not be necessary.

“Fracking may become one of those things that we remember from the past, simply because we have alternative energy,” Mr. Ridder said. “It may fade away.”

Ms. Sgamma said she believes Americans are too smart to buy the great leap forward into a green-energy utopia.

SOURCE

Your life under the Green New Deal

Your lives, living standards and world would suffer dramatically under a Biden-AOC-Harris GND

Paul Driessen

During the cantankerous September 29 presidential “debate,” candidate Joe Biden proclaimed “I am the Democratic Party.” He is in charge, he insisted, and his views will be Democrat policy. Others aren’t so sure – about that, about what his views actually are, or about how far to the left he would be pushed, prodded and pressured by Kamala Harris, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Antifa mobs, and coastal and blue city governing, academic and technology elites.

Mr. Biden has pledged to eliminate the Trump tax cuts, but has refused to say whether he supports single-payer nationalized healthcare, Second Amendment self-defense, packing the Supreme Court, eliminating the Senate filibuster, or adding Puerto Rico, Guam and Washington DC as new (Democrat) states.

Like Nancy Pelosi on ObamaCare, he wants us to vote for him, so we can find out what his positions are.

When he’s in California or Manhattan, he says he’ll ban fracking – which he claims to support when he’s in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where he needs rural and blue-collar voters who support and benefit greatly from this amazing technology. However, Mr. Biden does say he will put controlling Earth’s climate at the center of US foreign policy. So he strongly supports the Green New Deal (GND), which would completely replace fossil fuels with “clean, green” electricity and biofuel energy by 2035.

GND proponents want us to believe this can be done quickly, easily, affordably, ecologically, sustainably and painlessly – almost with the wave of a magic wand. Not a chance. Those in power would undoubtedly protect their privileged status. But the GND would control and pummel the jobs, lives, living standards, savings, personal choices and ecological heritage of rural, poor, minority, elderly and working classes.

Dependable coal and natural gas power plants will be replaced by intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar power; gasoline-powered vehicles with electric models. That’s obvious.

But our nation’s abundant coal, oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids provide over 80% of the energy that makes America’s jobs, lives and living standards possible. Locking them in the ground would have far-reaching impacts that are far less apparent, and have (deliberately?) received little media attention.

In 2018, America’s fossil fuels generated about 2.7 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity. But almost two-thirds of the nation’s non-exported natural gas served industrial, commercial and residential needs – including factories, hospital emergency power systems, and furnaces, ovens, stoves and hot water heaters in restaurants and tens of millions of US homes. That’s equivalent to another 2.7 billion MWh.

The nation’s 65 million cars, light trucks, buses, semi-trailers, motor homes, tractors, backhoes and other vehicles consumed the gasoline and diesel equivalent of yet another 2 billion MWh.

Altogether, that’s nearly 7.5 billion MWh that the Green New Deal would have to replace by 2035!

Even assuming the United States and world could mine, process and transport enough metals and minerals – and manufacture and transport all the components and finished equipment to make this happen – this brave new all-electric nation would require millions of onshore wind turbines, tens of thousands of offshore turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of vehicle batteries, billions of backup energy storage batteries, thousands of miles of new high voltage transmission lines, and billions of tons of concrete!

The GND would turn our Midlands – what elites denigrate as flyover country – into vast energy colonies. Millions of acres of farmland, wildlife habitat and scenic areas would be blanketed by industrial wind, solar and battery facilities, and power lines to electricity-hungry towns and cities. Windswept ocean vistas and sea lanes would be plagued by towering turbines. Birds, bats and other wildlife would disappear.

With mining still under assault in the USA, the metals, minerals, components and equipment would come mostly from China or Chinese companies in Africa, using vast quantities of fossil fuels, under minimal to nonexistent environmental, workplace safety, fair wage and child labor laws. This smells of slavery and racism – making us complicit in perpetuating it, and making it increasingly difficult for the United States to criticize or challenge China on human rights, pollution, military aggression or territorial expansion.

The GND would also mean ripping out, and throwing out, the natural gas appliances you now have, replacing them with electric models, and installing rapid charging systems for your cars. That will mean upgrading household, neighborhood and national electrical systems, to handle the extra loads.

Oil and natural gas are also feed stocks for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers … and plastics for computers, wind turbine blades, solar panel films and countless other products. Under the GND, we’d have to shut down those US-based industries, import feed stocks for them, or turn hundreds of millions of acres into biofuel plantations.

Up to 10 million high-pay petroleum, petrochemical and manufacturing jobs would be lost – with many replaced by low-pay, temporary or short-term jobs hauling, installing, maintaining, dismantling and landfilling wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. The GND would cost tens of trillions of dollars!

GND ringleader California wants the entire country to emulate its policies. Its families and businesses already pay the highest electricity prices in the continental USA – and are getting hammered repeatedly by blackouts. Now the state has mandated electric cars, cooking and heating. No more natural gas. How its legislators expect to generate all that extra electricity and avoid more blackouts, no one knows.

Families, factories, hospitals, schools and businesses used to paying 7, 9 or 11 cents per kilowatt-hour for 24/7/365 electricity better brace themselves for rude shocks. Under the GND, you’ll be paying 14, 18, 22 cents per kWh, as they do in green US states – or even 35 US cents per kWh, as they do in Germany. You’ll also be using twice as much electricity, and probably experiencing repeated power interruptions.

Get used to having electricity when it’s available, rather than when you need it, however “essential” your business services or family needs might be. How you will survive, whether your job will disappear, whether you will join the ranks of those who must choose between heating and eating, is anyone’s guess.

A week of cloudy weather will really reduce solar output – and wind turbines generate roughly zero electricity on the hottest and most frigid days. Be careful where you live or need to recharge your EV.

As to all those electric vehicles, a basic $39,000 Model 3 Tesla sedan has a battery module that weighs some 1,200 pounds and gets around 250 miles on a charge. Just don’t use the heater or AC, don’t take long family trips, and don’t get caught in a blizzard, or a traffic jam trying to escape a roaring forest fire.

How many tons of batteries a bus, semi-truck or mining excavator would require, where you’d put them, and how many hours a day you’d waste recharging them, are other important considerations. Perhaps Mr. Biden or Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has the answers.

The Obama Administration sent a heavily armed SWAT team into Gibson Guitar offices over a phony Endangered Species Act violation. Democrats refuse to condemn BLM and Antifa mob violence, arson and looting. How a Biden-Harris-AOC Deep State and its allies might respond to organized or even spontaneous resistance to Green New Deal dictates and impacts is pretty easy to imagine. So is their response to cities, counties and states declaring themselves “sanctuaries” to GND or gun control decrees.

Keep in mind, too: This entire GND energy, economic and living standards “transformation” is being justified by claims that we face a “climate emergency” and “ongoing ravages of climate change.”

It’s all a gigantic Climate Hustle. There is no climate emergency. Humans cannot control Earth’s climate and weather. Fossil fuel emissions have negligible effects. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is the miracle molecule that makes plant, human and animal life possible. Climate change and extreme weather have been “real” throughout history. What we are seeing today is in no way unprecedented.

Green New Dealers would bring us, our country and our planet enormous pain for no gain – except that they would get more money, power and control.

Via email

Controversial Aboriginal activist and incoming Greens senator declares she has NEVER sung the national anthem and finds the Australian flag offensive

You can see that she is just about as Aboriginal as I am. And my ancestry is entirely British. She’s just a far Leftist approval-seeker. But she is in the right party. The Australian Greens are far-Leftists.

The question remains whether she is approprite to sit in our parliament. Before sitting, all members have to make the oath of allegiance. It is a constitutional requirement. It reads:

“I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’ Her heirs and successors according to law. SO HELP ME GOD!”

If she doesn’t like Australia, she surely would not like swearing allegiance to our Head of State. But she must have taken the oath to be seated. So she is a fraud and an impostor

An incoming Greens senator has revealed she has never sung the national anthem and found the Australian flag to be offensive.

Lidia Thorpe will next week become the first-ever indigenous senator for Victoria when she swears an oath of allegiance to the Queen.

The 47-year-old activist and grandmother from Melbourne, who is replacing former Greens leader Richard Di Natale in federal Parliament, has declared she doesn’t associate herself with Advance Australia Fair.

‘I’ve never participated in the Australian anthem,’ she told the ABC’s 7.30 program.

Ms Thorpe has also expressed misgivings about the Australian flag, especially when it is displayed on Australia Day, January 26. ‘Yeah, and I feel that pain in terms of, I know what it’s like to feel offended,’ she said.

‘When I see Australian flags all over the media on the 26th of January and drinking and partying, when that day represents so much loss to our people. ‘I feel that pain too.’

Like some left-wing indigenous activists, Ms Thorpe regards the 1788 arrival of the British First Fleet as an ‘Invasion Day’ and the start of land being dispossessed.

Last year, she told UK-born actress Miriam Margoyles’ Almost Australian documentary she saw herself as an indigenous woman and not an Australian.

‘I don’t identify as being Australian. It’s a concept that’s been imposed on our people since we’re invaded,’ she told the program, which aired on the ABC in May. ‘The colonisers came and set up the colony which they now call Australia. ‘Mass genocide occurred.’

When she takes an oath in the Senate, Ms Thorpe will become just the eighth indigenous member of federal Parliament since Federation in 1901.

Ms Thorpe, who is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of female indigenous activists, said she was more than just a campaigner for Aboriginal rights.

‘I know that people see me as this radical angry black woman and, yes, I can be that, but I am a nice person too and I’m a mum, I’m a grandma, I’m a sister, auntie,’ she said.

Ms Thorpe, who became a mother at age 17 and lived in public housing, will be among five indigenous MPs in Canberra, alongside Labor’s Linda Burney, Malarndirri McCarthy and Pat Dodson, and Liberal Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt, who in 2010 became the first Aboriginal member of the House of Representatives.

Neville Bonner made history in 1971 as Australia’s first indigenous senator when he filled a casual Liberal Party vacancy in Queensland.

Aden Ridgeway in 1998 became the next indigenous senator with the Australian Democrats in New South Wales.

Olympic hockey gold medallist Nova Peris in 2013 became the first indigenous senator for the Northern Territory after Labor prime minister Julia Gillard insisted she replace Trish Crossin at the top of the party ticket at that year’s election.

Ms Thorpe in November 2017 became the first Aboriginal woman elected to the Victorian Parliament by winning the Melbourne inner-north seat of Northcote.

Ms Thorpe lost her seat a year after that by-election victory, sparked by the the death of Labor minister Fiona Richardson.

That led to her in June defeating Queens’s Counsel barrister Julian Burnside for Greens preselection to replace Senator Di Natale in Parliament.

SOURCE

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