Sorry Mainstream Media, Climate Change Has Not Caused 2023’s Heatwaves
Yeah, it’s summer and summer is typically hot, but it has been hotter than usual this summer across much of the globe.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of local daily temperature records around the world have been set during the present heatwave, which, in some locations, has persisted for an extended period of time. The heatwaves are real. I say heatwaves because it is not a single global heatwave but a series of regional ones.
For progressive bloviating politicians and alarmed reporters in mainstream media the cause of the present hot weather is simple: climate change. As H. L. Mencken once said, “[f]or every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
Climate change is a long-term phenomenon, driven by a combination of numerous factors at different locations during different eras. A single year’s spike in heatwaves is not evidence of long-term climate change; a steadily increasing trend in heatwaves would be, but that’s not what the evidence shows. Instead, data show that the warming of the past 150 to 170 years has not produced a trend of increasing heatwaves. As a result, the modest recent rise in global temperatures serves as a backdrop or baseline for the recent heatwave; it is not its cause.
It turns out a confluence of overlapping weather and meteorological events account for the pattern of persistent heatwaves in many locations.
One event contributing to a global rise in temperatures this year is the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption. Water vapor makes up 98 percent or more of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the subsea Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai eruption added an additional 10 to 13 percent to atmospheric water vapor. Scientists from NASA and the European Space Agency agree that this huge addition to the dominant atmospheric greenhouse gas is contributing significantly to this years’ temperatures.
In addition, El Niño is back, and it’s a strong one. Before the summer heatwave struck and the mainstream media focused on climate change as the reason behind it to the exclusion of almost every other factor, the media was warning that with the shift from La Niña to El Niño, hotter temperatures would result.
"Essentially, the atmosphere borrows heat out of the Pacific, and global temperatures increase slightly. This happened in 2016, the time of the last strong El Niño," commentary from The Conversation noted. "Global temperatures increased by about 0.25 F (0.14 C) on average, making 2016 the warmest year on record. A weak El Niño also occurred in 2019-2020, contributing to 2020 becoming the world’s second-warmest year."
The Heartland Institute and other groups held a press briefing in early July when the El Niño was officially declared, warning that as summer heated up, the mainstream media would largely begin to ignore El Niño’s role in present temperatures, focusing instead on climate change. Our concerns proved prescient. As heatwaves began setting local records, discussions of El Niño’s role disappeared.
One little discussed factor affecting this summer’s temperatures is the increasingly active sun. After a period of relative quiescence with little solar activity, the sun has become active again. An active sun has a direct, if modest, effect on the Earth’s temperatures.
Regionally, a variety of entirely natural weather patterns have also contributed to warming.
Across parts of the western and southeastern United States, and in southern and central Europe, heat domes or “blocking patterns” formed and persisted. As CNN described the situation, “an enormous, relentless stubborn ridge of high pressure has trapped air inside in a ‘heat dome’ resulting in extreme temperatures as the dome parks itself over areas.”
The blocking patterns in Europe trapped a heat dome there as it did in the western United States. In addition, in early July, the jet stream shifted. These two meteorological events combined to deliver colder than average, even fall like temperatures, in northern Europe and across the United Kingdom in July and into August, while locking-in, for an extended period of time, extreme summer temperatures in a large swath of southern European nations abutting or near the Mediterranean Sea.
Another factor contributing to hotter than average temperatures this summer is changes in the ocean circulation patterns in the North Atlantic. As Judith Curry, Ph.D., and Jim Johnstone note, it seems that sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic are unusually high this summer, due to significant changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation and weak surface winds. The resulting increase in Atlantic Ocean temperatures has been hyped in the media, but wrongly attributed to long-term climate change rather than localized, natural weather anomalies.
Fossil fuel use does not cause volcanic eruptions, oceanic and wind current shifts, or changes in solar activity, thus their use can’t be blamed for this summer’s heatwaves.
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Anatomy of the climate change hoax
Judith Sloan has decided to name Australia's Minister for Climate Change and Energy, ‘B1’. I prefer to think of Chris Bowen as a joker, because if he is not a joker, he is delusional. And that would make Senator McKim doubly delusional considering the outbursts we witnessed from him last week.
My belief in their delusion has been confirmed in my mind by reading Steven E Koonin’s book Unsettled: what the climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters. The book is replete with case studies about how science is being used and dramatically misused. It is the latter that has formed a pattern in our current public debate on climate.
Koonin explains the process that normally happens between when the science is being done and when we get to hear about it. He describes it as the ‘long game of telephone that starts with the research literature and runs through the assessment reports to the summaries of the assessment reports and on to the media coverage’.
Koonin realised this when he was asked to ‘stress test’ the literature about climate change. He was ‘not only surprised, but ‘shaken’ by what he found. At each point along the telephone game, there was dilution, obfuscation, or denial of what the science did and did not know. That means, as far as I can tell, that by the time the media got hold of the reports about the assessment of the science based on the actual scientific literature, it was a mess – but it was a targeted mess designed to fit the alarmist narrative.
Here are some results he found that contradict the meta-story in the media:
Humans have a growing but small warming influence.
The multitude of climate models disagree with or even contradict each other.
Government and UN press reports do not accurately reflect the reports themselves.
One of the founders of Green Peace, Patrick Moore, has catalogued other ‘fake, invisible catastrophes and threats of doom’ in his book (of that name). He also gives detailed descriptions of the fuller science on topics such as the Great Barrier Reef (and why Dr Peter Ridd was correct), why the CO2 alarmists are wrong, the polar bear fear of extinction, and many other fearful environmental stories that have become disconnected from reality. As an example of the dangers of computer modelling as tools for predicting the future, he notes: ‘The authors of this paper [about polar bears] are once more using a computer model as if it can actually predict the future. It’s time to call the alarmists out on this.’
Does our Minister for Climate Change and Energy read this stuff? If not, do his advisors? Worse still, on what grounds does the Labor government condemn so many Australians to hardship from his unrealistic energy agenda? Why does this federal leadership on energy make life harder for the most vulnerable of society? Why does this government prattle on about aged care while taking healthy options (like heating) from them? Are the Labor Party and its nest of advisors unaware of the basic science that deaths due to increased cold are much more frequent for the vulnerable than warmer climes? Do they understand that during the last warming period the Earth flourished in the Northern Hemisphere? Has it escaped them that the greening of the planet is doing better with whatever mild warming is occurring?
How does the Minister avoid the logic of Ian Plimer, Bjorn Lomberg, or Michael Shellenberger? Where are the public, informed debates about these very public contradictions within the science? Why haven’t journalists, or the Opposition, peppered him with this alternative assessment by Koonin?
…the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.
I really like how Claire Lehmann summarised this in her recent articles in The Australian. She outlined exactly how the telephone game happened. She notes, ‘GenCost’s modelling applies to hypothetical power prices from 2030 onwards – assuming all the infrastructure the Albanese government is currently investing in need not be accounted for. Is Chris Bowen aware of this? Has anybody told him?’
Lehmann proceeded to list questions that Bowen should be asked about his sources on which to make his claims about ‘the cheapest source of energy’.
But Bowen will not answer these questions. On that I am certain. Why? Because this scenario is the same as one through which we have just recently lived – Covid. Were we allowed to openly pursue the uncertainties in the science then? No. Were we allowed to talk publicly about our concerns? Not really, if we wanted to keep our jobs or social media accounts. Was our freedom about how to live, including how to earn our income and how we could spend our money, curtailed? Yes. Was the future generation being penalised for the acrimonious actions of fear-mongering and controlling elites? Yes. Were any of those elites making millions, if not billions of dollars from the misfortune of others? Yes.
And that is exactly what we are experiencing now in Australia, again. Senator Matt Canavan is correct in calling for a Royal Commission into how we managed Covid.
I claim that we need a Royal Commission into our response to climate science, now, while our economy and freedoms still have some semblance of democratic civility left in them. Without such a strong corrective, environmental alarmism continues to be a platform from the sneering elites in politics, business, and education to cancel the thoughts and freedoms of others.
Will we get such a review at this time? No – the B1 Joker appears to lack the capacity to understand these life-changing dynamics of his portfolio. And if the capacity is not there, he cannot have any will to change his approach even in the face of overwhelming public frustration.
Will anyone else?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/from-unsettled-to-unhinged
************************************************Is it time to ban electric vehicles?
The New York Fire Department recently reported that so far this year there have been 108 lithium-ion battery fires in New York City, which have injured 66 people and killed 13. According to FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, “There is not a small amount of fire, it (the vehicle) literally explodes.” The resulting fire is “very difficult to extinguish and so it is particularly dangerous.”
Last year there were more than 200 fires from batteries from e-bikes, EVs and other devices.
A fire ignited at an e-bike shop and killed four people near midnight on the morning of June 20. Two individuals were left in critical condition. The fire commissioner has warned New Yorkers that such devices could be very dangerous and typically explode in such a way that renders escape impossible.
FDNY also reports that in just three years, lithium-ion battery fires have surpassed those started by cooking and smoking as the most common causes of fatal fires in New York City. It’s happening all over the country as these blazes have become commonplace. Cars and e-bikes are randomly blowing up in driveways and garages.
Now let’s be honest: 13 deaths in a city the size of New York with some 8 million people is hardly an epidemic. Regulations should always be based on a cost versus benefit calculation, or there would be no cars at all.
And yet the same scaremongers on the left who have zero tolerance and want bans for small risks when it comes to everything from swimming pool diving boards, gas stoves, plastic straws, vaping, fireworks and so on, have a surprisingly high pain threshold when it comes to people dying or suffering critical injured from “green” electric battery fires.
Or consider this: In 1965, Ralph Nader almost single-handedly helped ban the popular Chevrolet Corvair — famous for its engine placed in the back trunk of the car. Nader’s bestselling shock book “Unsafe at Any Speed” declared the car was deadly. But there was no real evidence of that claim, and to this day there are no reliable statistics on how many passengers — if any — died in Corvairs from rear-end accidents.
What is indisputable is that EVs will cause far more deaths than Corvairs ever did.
One other example: There have been more fatalities in just one city in a single year from lithium-ion batteries in cars than all the people who died from the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident — which was zero.
Yet, after the accident, thanks to the environmentalists’ fear campaign (with the help of the blockbuster anti-nuke movie “The China Syndrome”), no domestic nuclear plants were built for three decades. That is despite the fact that nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases.
But with EVs, the greens are pushing aside any concerns about the collateral damage of deaths and injuries. Biden wants to mandate that nearly ALL new cars sold in the U.S. be EVs by 2032. If that happens, many thousands of Americans may die or will be inured from electric vehicle fires.
All this is especially hypocritical because once upon a time the left’s mantra was “no trading blood for oil.” Now they are willing to trade blood in exchange for getting Americans to stop using oil. An irony of all this is that because of all the energy needed to produce windmills, solar panels and electric batteries, new studies are showing that the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to this “net zero” transition is close to zero. It turns out, green energy causes some pollution, too.
For the record, I’m not in favor of the government banning EVs or e-bikes or just about anything. I just believe that we should make policy decisions based on real and factual risk assessments, not false scares and sensationalism.
As for the future of EVs, maybe it’s time for Ralph Nader to write a sequel to “Unsafe at Any Speed.”
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/08/15/stephen-moore-is-it-time-to-ban-electric-vehicles-1386863/
*******************************************************Gas bans ignite culture war, battery bonus is better, says Australian Liberal Party senator
Bans on household gas use risk opening up a fresh culture war over climate policy, moderate Coalition senator Andrew Bragg has warned, adding that the derailing of households’ use of electrical appliances could stop Australia reaching its climate targets.
Bragg said the federal government should instead offer tax breaks for household batteries, which he said would drive the uptake of systems that will be crucial to harnessing Australia’s vast supply of rooftop solar energy to continue cutting the nation’s carbon footprint.
“If we lose electrification to a culture war, we may never get to net zero,” Bragg will say in a speech to the Coalition for Conservation group on Friday.
The Victorian state government announced in July that gas connections to all new homes would be banned at the start of next year.
Bragg told this masthead that moves to remove the right to choose energy sources had sparked a damaging backlash in the US and said he believed it would likewise harm public support for climate action in Australia.
“During debates in the US Congress, the following is standard fare: ‘If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands’,” Bragg will say.
“Australia can do a lot better than that. If we lose electrification to a culture war, we may never get to net zero.”
Household emissions including electricity use and personal vehicles account for more than 40 per cent of Australia’s annual emissions. However, there are fewer than 50,000 household batteries installed across the country.
Installing electrical appliances backed with household batteries to lower gas use, such as induction cooktops, water heaters and reverse cycle air conditioners, is widely viewed as a crucial way to cut emissions and reduce power bills.
Bragg asked the Parliamentary Budget Office to model a tax deduction for home batteries.
It found a tax deduction of 50 per cent, capped at $3500, on the installation of a new home battery would deliver a 10 per cent increase in uptake by the middle of 2033. This scheme would cost the budget $375 million over the next 10 years.
The Parliamentary Budget Office also modelled a tax deduction of up to 75 per cent, capped at $5250, which it found would result in a 15 per cent increase in uptake by mid-2033 and cost the budget $584 million.
However, some experts say a ban on gas, coupled with subsidised loans for new appliances, is the best policy to drive household emissions reduction.
The Grattan Institute’s Getting Off Gas report urged governments to impose bans on new household gas connections and said low-interest loans to home owners were also needed to spur the uptake of appliances.
Grattan found that by switching from gas to electric appliances, an average household in Melbourne could save between $12,000 and $14,000 over 10 years based on their energy consumption, while an average household in Sydney could save between $2000 and $7000.
Bragg told this masthead that experts had failed to factor in the community division that would be caused by banning new households from gas connections.
“Household electrification is an absolute no-brainer and I don’t want to see it lost in a political bun fight,” he said.
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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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