"Christian" Warmist says all their disaster prophecies were not wrong
She appears to be claiming that the carbon-control policies that were adopted have prevented the prophesied disasters. Just one problem with that. The policies have NOT reduced or even slowed the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere. See the graph below
Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe discussed a recent United Nations report that warned about the impact of global warming on Monday's "PBS Newshour."
"PBS Newshour" invited climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe to discuss climate change predictions following the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on Monday.
The IPCC, an organization of experts convened by the United Nations, published an extensive report warning about the disastrous effects that global warming predictions are expected to have on humanity by the early 2030s. Many social media users have called out these claims, pointing out that past climate doom predictions have been wrong for decades.
However, Hayhoe insisted the predictions were not wrong and instead the "uncertainty" comes from humanity.
"The previous predictions were not wrong. The uncertainty is us. The predictions were for what will happen depending on the choices we make. Prior to the Paris Agreement in 2015, the world was heading towards a future that was between four to five degrees Celsius warmer than today," Hayhoe said. "You might say, well, that does not sound that bad, it‘s four or five degrees warmer. But think of it in terms of the human body. The temperature of the planet has been as stable as that of the human body over the course of human civilization. If our body is running a fever of one or two degrees Celsius, or four to six degrees Celsius, that is life-threatening."
She insisted, "We have already, thanks to the Paris Agreement, reduced the amount of change we can expect by policies enacted by at least one degree. But we still need more, because every bit of warming carries a cost with it."
Nawaz commented on United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ statement also made that day when he warned that the "climate time bomb is ticking."
"Humanity is on thin ice, and the ice is melting fast," Guterres said. "Humans are responsible for virtually all global heating over the last 200 years. The rate of temperature rising in the last half century is the highest in 2,000 years."
Hayhoe commented that the "dire" warning from Guterres is "completely justified."
"It is completely justified. We scientists have been warning about the impacts of climate change on humans, and all other life on this planet, for decades. Yet our carbon emissions continue to rise. As the IPCC report says, the window of opportunity we have to make decisions that will lead us to a better future is closing rapidly," Hayhoe said.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/climate-scientist-says-previous-predictions-climate-change-not-wrong
****************************************************European farmers fed up with climate policies shock political establishment
A young Dutch political party seeking to push back on the government's climate agenda achieved a stunning victory Wednesday as it won the most seats for a single party in the Dutch Senate.
"This isn't normal, but actually it is! It's all normal citizens who voted," party leader Caroline van der Plas said. "But today people have shown they can't stay at home any longer. We won't be ignored anymore."
The Farmer-Citizen Movement Party, known as BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) in Dutch, built its victory on the back of protests against the government’s environmental policies, which aim to slash nitrogen emissions by dramatically cutting back on livestock numbers and buying out thousands of farms. Nitrate and ammonia pollution significantly impacts biodiversity, particularly air and water quality.
The party appears on course to take 15 of the 75 Senate seats — more seats than Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative VVD party — with almost 20% of the vote, according to the BBC. Rutte built his victory on the back of a four-party coalition, which will now control 24 seats overall.
"Now is the time to take citizens seriously. I am open to talks with everybody. We are ready," van der Plas added.
Around 57.5% of voters turned out for the election, marking the greatest turnout in years.
Voters argue that the government’s approach does not support the farmers, and the government’s plan is "not good" for them as it stands.
However, the other big winner on the night was the Greens and center-left Labor Party coalition, an environmentally focused group that argued that climate problems will not just go away. The left-leaning coalition also won 15 seats, tying BBB.
The results mainly indicate that Rutte’s remaining time in office may prove difficult as he faces a challenge to push through any legislation that needs Senate support.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/european-farmers-fed-climate-policies-shock-political-establishment
**************************************************Britain's heat-pump fiasco
No one denies that changing the way we heat our homes will play a major role in eventually achieving a carbon neutral economy. Heating our houses accounts for 14pc of the UK’s carbon emissions, so unless we can find a clever offsetting scheme or make drastic changes to other parts of our economy, we will eventually have to find an alternative to the gas boilers that three-quarters of British households use right now
Right now, the Government's big idea is that we should all switch to heat pumps. These are electric devices that work like a fridge in reverse, taking warmth out of the air and then blasting it around our homes. Huge subsidies of up to £5,000 per home have been thrown at persuading us all to make the switch, and a target, because inevitably there is a target, of 600,000 installations a year has been set.
Indeed, for new houses, gas boilers will be banned from 2025, and existing homes may not be far behind. By the end of the decade, we may well be forcing people to rip out old heating systems. And yet amid some very stiff competition, the drive to install heat pumps as the country’s main source of domestic heating is turning into the greatest eco fiasco of the decade.
The latest blow to the Government’s agenda was delivered by Bosch. The German industrial giant has global sales of almost €90bn (£79bn), engineering expertise that stretches back to the 19th century, and is one of the world’s major suppliers of domestic heating systems.
By any reasonable standards, it can be said to know a thing or two about how to keep homes warm. And yet Vonjy Rajakoba, the managing director of Bosch UK, has pointed out an obvious problem: for heat pumps to work well in the cold, “you need well-insulated homes, [and] you also need space for heat pumps for the external unit”. Very true. Now, which homes lack these features?
Well, older ones. And as it happens, Britain, a country blessedly free of the ravages of war, has an exceptionally old housing stock compared to most major economies, with almost two fifths of our private homes built before 1945. Rajakoba, in turn, has noted that for Britain’s “fleet of Victorian houses or period houses and so on”, Bosch UK thinks “hydrogen, or in the interim hydrogen-ready boilers, are the solution”.
But the problems don’t stop there. Heat pumps don’t generate nearly as much heat as the equipment they are replacing, meaning that homes need to be insulated as well – and as we’ve just noted, it’s often virtually impossible to upgrade homes dating back to the 19th or even 18th century to the required standard. And insulation is not the only added expense involved.
The Government might be subsidising these things like there’s no tomorrow, but the current offers don’t cover the extra expense of installations or the additional running costs of a heat pump compared to a traditional gas boiler. Even with the grant, a pump based system could set you back more than £9,000 compared with less than £3,000 for a traditional alternative.
On top of that, we don’t have enough plumbers trained to install them all, and skills training is so poor in this country, and labour shortages already so severe, there is little prospect of that being fixed any time soon (indeed, the latest data showed the number of trained plumbing and heating engineers in the UK is currently falling by 4.1 per cent a year).
And even if by some miracle we did manage to get them all installed and they all worked, it’s not even clear we’d be able to generate enough electricity to power them all. We can’t seem to get a nuclear power station built or find a sensible way to manage the intermittent production of wind turbines.
It’s all too reminiscent of the HS2 debacle: an unnecessary product, consuming vast quantities of money, which is unsuitable for the UK, and which won’t be delivered on time or anything close to it. In short, a colossal white elephant.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/03/16/heat-pumps-have-become-eco-fiasco-decade
**************************************************Let’s stop pretending we are going to recycle all this plastic
The report in this newspaper that Australia stands no chance of reaching its goal of recycling 70 per cent of its plastic waste by 2025 is at once depressing and predictable.
Most of our single-use plastics cannot be recycled into a useful product at a reasonable cost. As voters and consumers we keep pretending it can, because we like plastic. It is cheap and useful.
So governments and industry go along with the charade, providing us with pantomime recycling efforts.
In turn, petrochemical companies, facing the end of the fossil fuel era, happily increase production.
You need only compare the economics of recycling streams to get a sense of how useless most of our waste plastic is.
Most metals and glass can be recycled endlessly, exhibiting the same quality in each of its new lives. That’s why people pay for scrap metal, while we had to pay China to take our waste plastic.
In 2017, China finally tired of taking the world’s plastic waste and banned new imports, leaving the rest of us to scramble to find something to do with our growing stockpiles.
In Australia, we have seen the collapse of REDcycle, the nation’s largest waste recycling scheme, with admissions that thousands of tonnes of warehoused plastic is bound for landfill.
In Europe, much of it is burned for energy in machines that might not release particulate pollution but do release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – burning plastic is after all burning oil.
In other parts of the world, plastic simply chokes rivers and seas and the creatures that live in them.
The New South Wales environment watchdog has issued ‘clean-up’ orders to the supermarket giants for 15 warehouses and storage depots around the state where soft plastics have been stockpiled.
Whether plastic is dumped under the ground or into the ocean, or burnt for energy, all plastic will eventually end up as a greenhouse gas.
In fact, according to analysis published in February by the Minderoo Foundation in conjunction with the global energy analysis firm Wood McKenzie, the climate consultancy Carbon Trust and KPMG, single-use plastics now generate as much greenhouse gas emissions as the United Kingdom.
Minderoo’s second Plastic Waste Makers Index found growth in single-use plastics made from fossil fuels was 15 times that of recycled plastics, and that between 2019 and 2021 global use of them surged from 133 million tonnes per year to 139 million tonnes, or about 1 kilogram per person on earth.
ExxonMobil remains the largest producer of polymers bound for single-use plastics – responsible for six million tonnes in 2021 – followed by China’s Sinopec, which produced 5.8 million tonnes, and US-based Dow third.
Growth in single-use plastics production was driven by demand for flexible packaging such as films and sachets, which grew from a 55 per share of all single-use plastics in 2019, to 57 per cent in 2021.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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