Wednesday, April 20, 2022



‘Experts’ get it wrong

Climate change scientists are willing to tell what their models predict. Beyond mentioning that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, they don’t adequately explain why more of it in the atmosphere will further warm the planet.

If the ‘science is settled’, as claimed, climate scientists should not have any difficulty in explaining it to an intelligent audience. If explanations are given, they are few and far between. No detailed mention is made of why a temperature increase of 1.5˚C above a particular average global temperature will cause great catastrophes.

Renewable technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage are often touted as replacements for fossil fuels. Contributors like Mark Lawson have pointed out the renewable energy folly. To demonstrate their capability against such comments, investors should build unsubsidised renewable energy farms. They might also like to purchase the machinery and facilities to mine, refine, manufacture, transport, and install their products, and provide facilities for their staff.

Using only their self-generated power output they should do all of the above tasks, as well as dispose of their products at the end of their approximately 20-25 year life. Their excess energy could be sold as ‘green’ energy. Only products made under those conditions should be sold as ‘certified clean green’. There is no reason to hand out subsidies because renewable energy promoters readily point out they are making energy cheaper.

Wind and solar electric generators have been made for long enough to demonstrate they can supply the energy needed to make all facilities necessary to regenerate themselves and supply the excess power needed for long-term baseload power needed to replace fossil fuels. No investors have developed such a facility. That suggests they are aware such a facility could never generate enough electricity to produce such capability, let alone sufficient additional energy to feed into a grid.

In its current form, more CO2 is generated in the production of solar panels, wind turbines, storage batteries, and electric vehicles than is saved by generating all electricity and transport using fossil fuels. Subsidising them is taking money from the poor, who can’t afford them, giving it to the rich who can afford them, and increasing the CO2 emissions they are trying to reduce.

It is easy to prove the above statements wrong. Point out all the solar and wind generators installations that currently produce sufficient electricity to make all the equipment needed to mine, refine, manufacture new generators (as well as the necessary equipment, facilities, and batteries needed), distribute, install, service and dispose of the end product in an environmentally friendly manner. Having done all that, their products must make sufficient energy to provide reliable baseload power to other industries and the community. If any exist, are they giving a return on their investment?

If additional atmospheric CO2 is a major problem, the answer is nuclear. In the meantime, new generation 50 per cent efficient clean coal-fired electric power generators convert half of the heat they generate to electricity. Solar panels average less than 20 per cent efficiency, the other 80 per cent is absorbed as heat. They generate double the heat per unit of electric power than the new clean coal power. That doesn’t include the heat or CO2 generated in their manufacture. It helps explain why some climate scientists are concerned about atmospheric CO2 levels rising even faster than predicted, despite the increasing uptake of wind and solar generators.

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UK: More Climate Indoctrination In The Classroom

A new ‘climate change’ GCSE will teach students ‘how to conserve the planet’. For ‘teach’ read ‘indoctrinate’.

The broad outline of the course has been drawn up – and now, officials will work with exam boards and Ofqual, the exams regulator, to design a full curriculum.

The course will aim to give young people “a deeper knowledge of the natural world around them”, and it will be available to students from 2025.

Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, who will formally announce the qualification on Thursday, said: “The new natural history GCSE will offer young people a chance to develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of this amazing planet, its environment and how to conserve it.”

It is one of the first new qualifications to be announced since the exam system was reformed in 2017.

Broad Outline For Course Drawn Up
The Department for Education says the natural history course would enable students “to explore the world by learning about organisms and environments, environmental and sustainability issues”.

The broad outline of the course has been drawn up, but now officials will work with exam boards and Ofqual, the exams regulator, to design a full curriculum.

A 2021 global survey across 10 countries demonstrated the depth of anxiety many young people are feeling about ‘climate change’.

Nearly 60 percent of young people approached by Bath University said they felt very worried or extremely worried about the environment.

The survey spoke to 10,000 people aged between 16 and 25.

What Are Students Currently Taught?
Students already learn about the urbanisation and landscapes in geography and habitats in science.

During COP26, the education secretary said teachers will be supported in delivering ‘climate change’ education through a new science curriculum in place by 2023.

‘Climate change’ is currently on the curriculum and taught in science, citizenship and geography from Key Stage 3 (the beginning of secondary school) onwards.

In primary school (Key Stages 1 and 2) pupils are taught the core concepts – including what the climate is, how it changes, and the difference between manmade and natural environments.

The education secretary will also launch a wider Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy, which will “help young people develop excellent knowledge of STEM and practical opportunities to improve biodiversity and climate resilience”.

Editor’s note: The survey only noted the views of people aged 16 to 25, which sociologists tell us is the ages where people reason emotionally. After about 25, people start to reason logically, which is why most older people can recognise a scam, where many youngsters cannot. It is for this reason all the climate propaganda is aimed at young people, to illicit an emotional response.

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Climate Change Is Not Causing an Increase in ‘Dixie Alley’ Tornadoes

A recent article by a meteorologist writing for WDSU New Orleans, “Rising tornado numbers linked to climate change, study says,” makes the erroneous claim that climate change is causing more tornadoes in the southeastern United States. In reality, data show overall tornado occurrences nationwide are likely trending downwards as the planet modestly warms. The writer of the article appears to have misrepresented or misunderstood tornado research.

Meteorologist Adam McWilliams says climate change is shifting more tornadoes into “Dixie Alley,” a region of the Southeastern United States that has a high tornado outbreak frequency.

McWilliams writes in the WDSU article, “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] says since January 2019, 99 of the nation’s 120 tornado-related deaths – 83% — have occurred in the Southeast. In the 2010s, NOAA says 54% of tornado deaths occurred in the Southeast, up from 25% in the 1980s.”

This is a poor argument. As a matter of logic, if the number of tornadoes in Tornado Alley decrease, as some research suggests, then the percentage of deaths by region would be expected to shift, as well.

After misrepresenting NOAA’s findings McWilliams referenced another report, writing, “A 2016 study from Purdue University says that climate change is linked to this increase in tornado activity,” and describes the results of the study, which found an eastward bias for tornado occurrence over time.

In the Purdue news release linked in the article, the study’s authors make far more modest, scientifically circumspect claims. The researchers forthrightly state more research is needed before they could definitively point to climate change as the culprit.

Their research divided the last sixty years into two thirty-year sections, and analyzed tornado occurrences, with the earlier thirty year block representing a cooler period.

From the release:

Data showed a notable decrease in both annual counts and tornado days in the traditional “tornado alley” of the central plains, aided by declines in summer and autumn. However, annual values were sustained in the southeast with some increase in “Dixie alley” due in part to substantial autumn seasons increases from Mississippi to Indiana, Agee said.

Severe tornadoes are decreasing nationally, contrary to alarmist claims, a fact NOAA has recently tried to hide. Climate Realism has covered this several times, including here, here, and here, for example.

As the NOAA Tornado Climatology and Data page explains:

“The increase in tornado numbers is almost entirely in weak (EF0-EF1) events that are being reported far more often today due to a combination of better detection, greater media coverage, aggressive warning verification efforts, storm spotting, storm chasing, more developmental sprawl (damage targets), more people, and better documentation with cameras (including cell phones) than ever.”

Got that! Better detection of tracking of weak tornadoes, not more tornadoes, are responsible for the seeming increase in tornadoes overall.

Tornadoes are weather events, and cannot be conclusively linked to a changing climate. When presented the question “Does climate change cause tornadoes,” NOAA’s tornado research FAQ compiled by Roger Edwards responds with a solid “No,” and goes on to explain that “Climate models cannot resolve tornadoes or individual thunderstorms.”

Even the VORTEX Southeast page linked by McWilliams rejects his premise, and goes into detail about the reasons why tornado outbreaks in the Southeast seem to be worse than in other regions.

From their home page:

For example, tornadoes in the Southeast occur in a region often characterized by hills and trees which reduce visibility of the horizon. They are also more likely to occur at night, in fast-moving storms, and earlier in the year compared to other parts of the country. Furthermore, vulnerability is increased by unique socioeconomic factors, which VORTEX-Southeast research has shown include inadequate shelter, housing type, and larger population density relative to other tornado-prone areas in the U.S.

The real problem for the southeast, especially Mississippi, which in fairness McWilliams did devote the second half of his article to, is poor infrastructure and a larger, more dense population with a lot of people living in mobile homes. This combination of dense population and fragile infrastructure offers more, more vulnerable, targets for tornado damage.

As a meteorologist, McWilliams should have recognized this, and been more honest in his reporting on tornado occurrences in the southeast. It seems before sitting down to write, McWilliams failed to do the research necessary to provide a balanced, fully informed article on tornado trends in the Southeastern United States. Perhaps that was intentional, since only a misrepresentation of the evidence can generate alarming claims that climate change is causing more tornadoes.

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Climate cowards and apocalypse peddlers

Have you ever questioned the links between bushfires and atmospheric CO2?

Discussions about the changing climate and the level of human contribution are only allowed if the discussion follows the approved narrative. Heaven forbid somebody decides to do their own research into how global average temperatures are calculated, how many temperature stations were around in 1850, how climate models compare to observations, how CO2 functions as a greenhouse gas, and how past predictions have borne out.

For those who would label me a ‘denier’, I have a label for you – coward. Allow me to explain my contempt.

If green-left politics is your bag and you endorse the approved message, please explain your doomsday cultist narrative and how your objectives will send us backward to enjoy the living standards of a third-world country, with negative impacts on the environment.

To those who say that ‘Australia should be a climate leader’, I ask you to show evidence of a country both cutting emissions and improving its economy, living standards, and security, while pushing the renewables mantra. The world’s best examples of high renewables all have high electricity costs – Germany, United Kingdom, California, and Australia.

If you are not swayed by real-life examples of failure, then I urge you to ask yourself, why the ‘experts’ are pushing us into weather-dependent power sources, when the weather is supposed to become more unpredictable and extreme?

To the renewables lobby, including their sycophant ‘experts’, media, and political allies, I ask why, if your product is so good, do you continuously push for subsidies, targets, market intervention, cheap finance, and government spending, all while demonising the fossil fuel industry that has almost single-handedly created our current abundance of wealth and health.

To those who say ‘we need more climate action’, I ask you to quantify those actions and the effects of those actions on the climate. Please be specific. You and your ilk have a history of vagueness and being very, very wrong.

To those who rave about ‘the transition’, I ask you to define the end of the so-called transition – when will this magic outcome occur, and what does it look like? Because to me, this transition looks like a never-ending cycle of building wind/solar/batteries, with their short life-span requiring replacement every 10-20 years.

To anybody who believes emissions reduction is important, I ask if you support nuclear power.

If you think the federal government has any role in the management of bushfires, I ask you to look at the responsibilities and performance of the state environmental and emergency service bureaucracies.

If you think the world is going to end because of sea-level rise, I ask you to put ice cubes in a glass, fill it with water, then wait for the ice to melt and observe the glass not overflowing.

If you think ‘the science’ is infallible, I ask you to read what Alan Finkel, Peter Ridd and Richard Horton have to say about the credibility crisis in scientific published research. Then give the ClimateGate emails a once-over. Then ask why the world’s primary atmospheric carbon dioxide measurement laboratory is located beside an active volcano.

If you are swayed by ‘the consensus’, I ask you to read Happer, Lomborg, Plimer, Schellenberger, Epstein, Spencer, Curry, Peiser, and Ridley. Then compare those with the writings of Gore, Thunberg, and Obama.

If you find yourself convinced by the weighty opining of ‘experts’ that all CO2 increase is caused by human activities, I recommend the mission pages of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory and the finding that in one year, the combined emissions from three rainforests increased by five-times Australia’s annual emissions.

If CO2 emissions are the first thing you think about when you wake in the morning, consider that global emissions reduction reduced by almost 10 per cent in 2020 because of Covid lockdowns, and that it cannot be differentiated from natural variation (according to NOAA).

If the fact that burning coal has led to prosperity and improved health for billions of people hurts your brain, try this:

Burning wood releases the carbon isotopes C12, C13 and C14
Burning coal and gas releases only C12 and C13
Measuring the dilution of C14 in the atmosphere proves the increase of C12 and C13

You can’t apportion how much CO2 is entering the atmosphere from burning coal, without knowing how much CO2 of all types is also entering and disappearing from the atmosphere separately

If you think the UN has Australia’s best interests in mind, I ask you to name another large, unelected bureaucracy that you trust to decide your best interests. Then ask what the UN has done for you lately.

If you think CO2 emissions are the harbinger of doom, then I ask you to lead by example and commit to a single vehicle, composting, no air conditioners or plane travel, using only local seasonal produce, no batteries, no computers, no electricity, no running water, no textiles, nothing made in a factory or transported or harvested by machine, or grown using fertiliser and herbicides.

If you find yourself nodding along with phrases like ‘green hydrogen superpower’, I suggest you look up how much energy is consumed in producing green hydrogen, how the energy for green hydrogen is generated, and what that looks like on the environment.

If you quite like your first-world lifestyle, spare a thought for the third-world where people are being offered the joys of solar panels, which doesn’t remove them from poverty.

If you are tempted to label me a right-wing nutjob, climate-change denier, racist, a symptom of the colonial white privileged patriarchy, go for it. But please allow me to respond…

If you are part of the media, political, or scientific elite and you disagree with anything I’ve said, but you cannot be bothered to look it up yourself, if you’ve never bothered to look into the so-called ‘other side’, if you have no interest in the truth of things, if you cannot bring yourself to challenge your pre-conceived ideas, then you are a climate coward.

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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