The Arctic could have an ice free summer as soon as the 2030s – a decade earlier than previously thought

The usual modelling nonsense from the usual people. One wonders how their prophecy fits with the recent finding showing that the Antarctic ice area has GROWN by 5305 km2 from 2009-2019.

No wonder that Warmists like the Arctic and ignore the Antarctic. That the two might balance one-snother out is just too unthinkable for them. Someone should tell then that both are part of the globe. Link to the Antarctic study below:

https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/17/2059/2023/

Arctic sea ice grows and shrinks according to the time of the year, but a study published in Nature Communications on Wednesday reveals the overall area has been declining during recent decades, with the trend accelerating since 2000.

The sixth assessment report of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) claimed the Arctic would be “practically ice-free” in September (the end of the Arctic summer) by around 2050, but the new modelling produced by South Korean and German scientists shows this could now occur as early as the 2030s.

Of particular concern, the researchers found this would happen even under the IPCC’s second-most optimistic emissions scenario, called SSP1-2.6, in which the entire world gets to net zero some time after 2050, and global temperature increases stop at 1.8°C by the end of the century.

Temperatures have already risen 1.1°C above the pre-industrial average, and are all but guaranteed to rise higher, given emissions of the greenhouse gases which cause global warming are still increasing.

“These results emphasise the profound impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the Arctic, and demonstrate the importance of planning for and adapting to a seasonally ice-free Arctic in the near future,” the authors stated in their report.

Emeritus Professor David Karoly from the University of Melbourne, an internationally recognised expert on climate change and climate variability, said the loss of Arctic sea ice would itself further accelerate global warming.

“The sea ice in the Arctic region is critically important for reflecting sunlight back out to space. When it disappears, there’s no longer as much reflection … which means more sunlight is absorbed into the ocean waters in spring and summer … and that means faster warming,” he said.

While that was a massive concern, some countries would perceive benefits from an ice-free Arctic, Prof Karoly said.

“Shipping from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean and vice versa is much shorter and much cheaper if it goes through an ice free Arctic than if it has to go through the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal,” he said. “That is very relevant to some countries like Russia and China.”

Another possible “positive” from the melting of Arctic sea ice was that it might lead to a weakening of the so-called “polar vortexes” which occasionally smash the US, Europe and China, Prof Karoly said.

While Antarctica had traditionally not experienced the same scale of ice loss as the Arctic, Prof Karoly said, over the past five years the southern continent had also experienced “large declines” in its sea ice.

Last month researchers from the University of NSW showed the melting of Antarctic ice had already slowed deep ocean currents by 30 per cent.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/environment/ice-cap-gone-by-2030s-new-warning/news-story/4703c5ab1275c1e2ad686c2480df5d91

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Thank the green-energy cult for major blackouts this summer

Summer’s coming. That means sunshine, swimming, cookouts — and blackouts. That’s the warning from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

According to NERC, at least two-thirds of the country is at risk for major power outages this summer. This extends to most everyone west of the Mississippi except for Texas.

Texas and much of the Midwest will be fine, the report says, so long as we don’t experience hot, windless summer days.

Well, that’s a relief. When do we ever get hot, windless summer days in Texas and the Midwest?

Part of the problem is the steady removal of fossil-fuel plants from the grid.

These plants are supposed to be replaced by renewables — wind and solar — but wind doesn’t work on windless days, and solar doesn’t keep your air conditioning running on steamy nights.

The Wall Street Journal reports the Environmental Protection Agency has made things worse with new nitrogen-oxides rules from its recently finalized “Good Neighbor Plan, which requires fossil-fuel power plants in 22 states to reduce NOx emissions. NERC predicts power plants will comply by limiting hours of operation but warns they may need regulatory waivers in the event of a power crunch.”

The Journal notes, “The EPA claimed the rule wouldn’t jeopardize grid reliability, but then why would power plants need waivers to prevent blackouts?”

Why indeed?

There are other technical problems, too: Faulty solar inverters are in widespread use, and these can fail and make grid problems worse.

The Journal’s advice: Buy an emergency generator while stores still have them; don’t wait until later this summer when everyone will want one. (Done!)

We had a warm-up (chill-down?) for this crisis last winter, when many places experienced rolling blackouts due to inadequate power supplies in the face of cold temperatures that were not, in fact, unusually cold.

My own area in Knoxville, Tenn., saw temperatures in the single digits, which are not that unusual but which power-company hacks called “unprecedented.”

Knoxville’s lowest temperature was 24 below, back in 1985, and they managed to keep the lights on for that. But that was before the Tennessee Valley Authority started shutting down coal, nuclear and gas plants.

What used to be one of the nation’s best areas for cheap abundant power — that’s why much of the Manhattan Project was located nearby — now faces rolling blackouts because the weather is chilly.

But it wasn’t just TVA. Duke Energy apologized to its customers for rolling blackouts, too.

It was a problem across a wide area amid temperatures that, while chilly, were really nothing so bad as to justify widespread shutdowns.

New York is not looking great, as state regulations are forcing gas and oil “peaker” plants — quick-start power plants that can help meet peak demand in a crisis — offline.

Utilities that can’t meet peak demand have to engage in “load-shedding” via rolling blackouts or face total collapse. That just got harder.

Why is all this happening now?

The short answer is the people running things care more about green politics than they care about the quality of life of the people they’re supposed to be serving.

A sensible regulatory system would put grid reliability at the top of the priority list.

When power goes out, people’s lives are disrupted, the old and sick are put at risk (in the heat and especially in the cold), businesses have to shut down and lose money, workers forgo pay, and the entire atmosphere shifts closer to that of a decrepit Third World nation.

If you cared about both the planet and the people, you wouldn’t take power plants offline until you’d put enough new capacity online to replace them and meet projected additional demand.

And you wouldn’t make unreliable technologies like wind and solar, which tend to fail when they’re most needed, the mainstay of your generating scheme.

To its credit, TVA, at least, is working to build more nuclear plants, which are both carbon-free and highly reliable, to bolster its capacity.

But I doubt we’ll see that in New York or California any time soon — though many European nations recognize nuclear as a greenhouse-friendly source of power. (And one we’ll need even more if the government’s plan to replace most vehicles with electrics goes forward.)

But we’re not seeing sensible, people-friendly energy policies in very many places across America. That’s because we don’t have sensible, people-friendly leadership.

In fact, if the people running things wanted to make ordinary Americans’ lives worse, what would they be doing differently?

As you ponder that question, consider buying a generator. I did.

https://nypost.com/2023/06/05/thank-the-green-energy-cult-for-major-blackouts-this-summer/

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Unions lambast British Labour party over ‘naive’ green energy plan

Two of Labour’s biggest union backers have criticised a central pillar of Sir Keir Starmer’s green strategy.

Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB, joined Unite’s Sharon Graham yesterday in criticising the pledge to ban new licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. He said the proposals were naive and displayed a “lack of intellectual rigour and thinking”.

Smith told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday: “Their policies are going to create a cliff-edge with oil and gas extraction from the North Sea.”

He said he thought that workers in the petrochemical industry “are going to be very worried about what Labour are saying and I think it is time for Labour to focus on the right thing rather than what they think is the popular thing”.

While vowing to ban new drilling, Starmer has said that Labour would allow existing North Sea projects to continue until 2050.

Last week Graham, general secretary of Unite, warned that “Labour must now be very clear that they will not let workers pay the price for the transition to renewable energy”.

She said: “We cannot have a repeat of the devastation wrought on workers and their communities by the closure of the coalmines. It is reckless in the extreme to talk about halting this industry without offering a coherent, fully funded plan for jobs.”

Last year the GMB and Unite each gave Labour about £1.2 million.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/unions-lambast-labour-over-naive-green-energy-plan-rtxmrzvcp

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The totalitarian roots of the anti-human environmentalist cult

The modern environmentalist movement is often compared to a pantheistic religion. It certainly contains a vision of sin and repentance – damnation and salvation.

At the Copenhagen climate change summit in December 2009, then Prince Charles, now King Charles III, warned that the survival of mankind itself was in peril and a mere seven years remained ‘before we lose the levers of control’ over the climate.

We should always take care of the environment, be responsible with its protection, and, at the same time, help the poor. And yet if the demands of radical environmentalists were to be met, they would have a deleterious effect on world standards of living, particularly among poorer nations.

For example, efforts to convince world governments to cut carbon emissions has made energy less affordable and accessible, which drives up the costs of consumer products, stifles economic growth, and imposes especially harmful effects on the poor. Arguably, ‘allocating monetary resources to help build sewage treatment plants, enhance sanitation, and provide clean water for poor people would have a greater immediate impact on their plight than would the battle over global warming’. (D. James Kennedy PhD and Jerry Newcombe, How Would Jesus Vote? A Christian Perspective on the Issues (WaterBrook Press, 2008) 144.)

We are constantly told that the temperature is increasing, the seas are rising, the ice is shrinking, and the polar bears are vanishing. These claims are not supported by conclusive evidence; indeed the opposite appears to be the case considering predictions always fail. However, the belief that carbon dioxide emissions are heating up the Earth’s atmosphere to a catastrophic degree has been afforded the status of incontestable faith. Australia has even created a government Minister for ‘Climate Change’, suggesting absurdly that politicians can influence the weather! It should come as no surprise that the Australian government has embraced the idea that global warming is happening, humans are to blame, and that doing something drastic about it is in Australia’s best interest.

Global warming theory rests on the belief that rising CO2 levels drive up the temperature of the atmosphere. Despite this degree of terrifying environmental alarmism and crippling government spending to curb ‘carbon emissions’, historically, temperature increases have often preceded high CO2 levels, destroying this theory of cause and effect. Our world has always warmed and cooled. The theory of anthropomorphic global warming contradicts what we know historically to be the case.

‘The public shaming and bullying of any scientist who differs from climate change orthodoxy is eerily reminiscent of a latter-day Salem Witch-trial or Spanish Inquisition, with public floggings meted out – metaphorically speaking – for their thought crimes. Indeed, “dissenters”, as they have also been labelled, suffer ritual humiliation at the hands of their colleagues and the media, with their every motivation questioned and views pilloried.’ (James Paterson, ‘Tim Flannery: Climate Prophet’, IPA Review, June 2011, 9.)

Curiously, just as cancel culture and historical revisionism has roots in Maoism, elements of modern environmentalism are beginning to bear more resemblance to a certain totalitarian movement than a scientific community.

During the interwar period, there was particular association between environmentalists and German nationalists, among whom a number subsequently became Nazis. ‘Environmentalists and conservationists in Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazi regime with open arms and hoped that it would bring about legal and institutional changes.’ According to Kaitlin Smith, a Boston-based scholar and naturalist educator:

‘Nazi leadership ardently championed renewable energy and institutionalised organic farming and land use planning on a level unmatched by any nation past or present. These environmental policies might seem like a welcome departure from the rest of Nazi propaganda, but their environmentalism was actually grounded in the same racist worldview that shaped the Holocaust.’

Historians generally agree that Alfred Seifert ‘spoke the language of the emerging ecological movement’. He was a ‘charismatic leader of a coterie of like-minded people’ who has been characterised as ‘the most prominent environmentalist in the Third Reich’. Seifert went on to become ‘a key figure in the postwar environmental movement in Germany’. From 1934 onward, he headed a group of Nazi officials whose role was to oversee the ecological impact of public works projects sponsored by Hitler’s regime. His positions became official in 1935 and continued to be so in the war years, emphasizing that ‘previous generations had disrupted the “balance” of the natural world and failed to take a “holistic view” of the environment’. But this destructive approach, which was ‘alien to nature’, Seifert believed that it finally ‘had been overcome thanks to the leadership of the Third Reich’.

Seifert promoted an environmentalist worldview that shared fundamental points of contact with the ‘blood and soil’ principles of National Socialism. In October 1934, he was portrayed as the paragon of a ‘truly National Socialist’ approach to environmental issues. Seifert, in turn, published a vast number of articles in Nazi periodicals ‘outlining his amalgam of environmentalism and National Socialism’. After repeated requests from environmentalist advocates who expressed confidence in his work and its importance to Germany’s future, Seifert was promoted to the civilian equivalent of general in 1944. He was a frequent visitor to the Dachau extermination camp, and ‘cooperated closely with its head gardener, SS officer Franz Lippert, who was responsible for maintaining biodynamic standards’. Active in the Nazi regime during the second world war, ‘Seifert’s collaboration on the Dachau project continued until shortly before the liberation of the camp in 1945’.

Above all, many Nazi leaders embraced a naturalist worldview and animal welfare was a significant issue in the Nazi regime. Hermann Göring, one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi dictatorship, was a professed animal lover who, on instructions of Hitler, committed those who violated Nazi animal welfare laws to concentration camps. Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), was a vegetarian and certified animal rights activist who aggressively promoted the idea of ‘natural healing’ who, As Anna Bramwell observes, ‘SS training included respect for animal life of near Buddhist proportions’.

The Nazis did not show such a respect, of course, for human beings. In hindsight, it may not be difficult to reconcile such Nazi views with an environment orientation. In the eyes of Nazi environmentalists, ‘the privations of war encouraged a renewed emphasis on self-sufficiency and sustainability, allowing Germans to find their way back to the soil and its living forces’.

‘For some green-leaning Nazis … the war and destruction were necessary evils since they would bring about a new order that would finally allow the establishment of a better and greener Germany.’ (Marc Cioc Franz-Josef Brueggemeier and Thoams Zeller, How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation ain the Third Reich (Ohio University Press, 2005) 14.)

Hitler himself was a vegetarian who wanted to turn the entire nation vegetarian. In his diaries, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels reports numerous private conversations with Hitler, including a December 19, 1939, talk in which the Nazi leader contends that humans ‘are not removed from other animals’. After trying to convince Goebbels on the virtues of vegetarianism, he argued that the human species had evolved from reptiles through mammals, and that he did ‘not think much of Homo Sapiens’. Peter Staudenmaier, a history professor at Marquette University, comments:

‘Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green Utopian, discussing authoritatively and in details various renewable sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring “water, winds and tides” the energy path of the future.’

In his youth, Hitler studied yoga, astrology, and various forms of Eastern occultism. The Nazi leader believed that, in the long run, Nazism and Christianity would ‘no longer be able to exist together’. For him, once the Nazis finally prevailed in the war, Germany would be able to restore ‘their paganism of antiquity’ and the Germans embrace a new form of ‘Mother-Earth’ worship as a substitute for the ‘Jewish bondage of law’. According to Nazi philosopher Ernst Bergmann of Leipzig University, the Germans needed to embrace a new spirituality whereby everyone should live in complete harmony with nature. Influenced by ‘forces of nature’, Bermann stated, the Germans would be ‘re-born in the womb of Mother Earth’ and rediscover ‘the God that is in us’.

Arguably, the idea of cooperation with the natural world appears to be incompatible with the genocidal policies of the Nazi dictatorship. ‘How could people who spoused ‘a new appreciation for the environment’ and ‘ecological balance’ and ‘the harmony with nature’ have anything to do with Hitler’s war of conquest, racial resettlement, and concentration camps?’ asks Staudenmaier rhetorically. According to him:

‘The seemingly uncanny convergence between blood and soil ideology and modern ecological concepts makes more historical sense when seen in the context of early environmental talk. In the first decades of the twentieth century, in Germany as elsewhere, racial beliefs and environmental sentiments often went hand in hand. A stance that combined landscape aesthetics, ecological concern, and racial pride was not an anomaly, but shared by most conservationists.’

The legacy of Nazi environmentalism poses a dilemma for modern environmentalists. If modern environmentalism was to take off, it has to shed its unhappy links with fascism, anti-humanism, and authoritarian-style implementation. As Professor Staudenmaier points out:

‘The necessary project of creating emancipatory ecological politics demands an acute awareness and understanding of the legacy of classical ecofascism and its conceptual continuities with present-day environmental discourse … the record of fascist ecology shows that under the right conditions such an orientation can quickly lead to barbarism.’

Some of the Nazis’ essentially irrationalist anti-humanism remains intrinsic to environmentalist thinking. Accordingly, modern environmentalism generally demonstrates the same disregard regard for the human life. Within the modern environmentalist movement, there are those that continue to refer to human beings as an invasive virus, a plague, and a problem that the world would be better without.

A growing number of environmentalists have succumbed to the highly dangerous notion that there is nothing special about human life.

It is hard to imagine anything more terrifying than living in a culture where human life is made relative to lesser values. Instead of seeing humans as precious creatures conceived in the image of God, many environmentalists presently see their fellow humans as the cause of all the earth’s problems, especially global warming.

We have come to the point that even new human life is seen as a threat to the environment, where some argue that they represent a source of green house gases and a consumer of natural resources. This thinking is leading conversations about the West adopting population control measures similar to the Communist China one-child policy.

Tragically, not only are the younger generations being convinced not to have children due to fear of endangering the planet, they are also terminating their healthy pregnancy with some going so far as to openly claim that it was done in service of climate goals. Children, in this context, are increasingly seen as being a selfish act.

It is deeply disturbing to see a woman describe motherhood as something entirely negative, and to believe that having children is morally wrong. Forgoing children is being promoted as environmentally friendly while childless women are doing their bit to reduce the carbon footprint of civilisation.

Unfortunately, much of today’s environmental movement contains an anti-humanism that promotes the elimination of people. It is built on the alarmist narrative that if nothing is done, human life will bring the destruction of the global ecosystem therefore the active decline of society, even at the expense of children, is a worthy cause.

This sort of attitude betrays a desire to bring death and destruction at a large scale. Although such sentiments are deeply disturbing, what links this to some other environmentalists is their shared desire to exterminate a great proportion of the world’s population in search of some Utopian small number of sustainable survivors.

The point is that evil can be and often is perpetrated under the guise of doing good and the fanatical environmentalists err morally by believing that their vision of ‘saving the planet’ should be imposed regardless of the present human cost. Accordingly, contemporary environmentalist ideas that were central to fascist movements – about the organic harmony of the earth, the elevation of animal rights, and the denigration of human as enemies of nature – are today vividly presented as the acme of environmentalist thinking. As such, of course, environmentalism’s fundamental opposition to progress and modernity propels it straight into the arms of neofascism.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/the-totalitarian-roots-of-the-anti-human-environmentalist-cult

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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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