Sunday, September 17, 2023
‘Heat waves are the killer’: Australia's very own false prophet warns of deadly risk over summer
Flannery is well-known for prophesying that Perth would become a ghost city for a lack of water. Perth of course continues to thrive
His latest prophecy is just as mad. It is COLD weather, not hot weather, when most deaths occur
The long-range weather forecasts have been worrying. Australia faces a long hot summer with an increased risk of drought.
And while there will always be fears of bushfires, especially after the devastating black summer of 2019-2020, Tim Flannery warns that heat waves might be the biggest concern this season.
“All indications are we’re heading for a very hot summer, but we’re still getting some rain,” the Climate Council’s chief councillor said. “The potential for heat waves to have a big impact on human health is really there.
“You don’t need floods or bushfires to impact human health. Heat waves are the number one killer of people among natural phenomena so that’s a big concern.”
Flannery, a long-time advocate for more action to combat climate change, cited the 2009 heat wave in south-east Australia that health authorities have said contributed to the death of more than 370 people in Victoria alone.
“Melbourne saw it very clearly [then] when there was four days above 40 degrees and very little cooling at night,” he said.
Flannery was speaking before the release of a new documentary, Johan Gabrielsson’s Climate Changers, which has him interviewing leaders of the climate movement around the world. It launches in cinemas with a live Q&A session on Sunday.
**************************************************
Is the EU sacrificing net zero to protect its electric car industry?
A conflict between Green values
They are too expensive. There are not enough of them on the market. It’s too much hassle to charge them. There are lots of reasons why people are still reluctant to switch from petrol to electric cars, with their cost right at the very top of the list.
Still, with the world about to be flooded with cheap Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), that is about to change. You might think that anyone seriously worried about combating climate change would welcome that. Except now it turns out that the EU, for all its rhetoric, cares more about protecting its own auto industry and is planning to slap tariffs on Chinese imports.
The trouble is, tariffs will slow down the adoption of EVs, and make it harder to hit net zero
Ursula von der Leyen’s state of the union address yesterday was full of the usual self-congratulatory guff about closer cooperation, and deepening the union. It, however, did contain one nugget of news.
The EU is launching an ‘investigation’ into whether China’s EVs have received subsidies from the state. For an organisation that has been loudly boasting about how much it is spending on ‘green industries’, such as new types of vehicles and the batteries that power them, it seems, to put it mildly, just a touch hypocritical to ‘investigate’ China for doing exactly the same thing. Even so, there is little doubt about what will happen next. The subsidies will be ‘found’ and tariffs applied. Indeed, China has already started complaining about just that.
Sure, of course on one level we can see what the EU is worried about. While companies such as Tesla led the way in the early shift to EVs, China is about to overtake everyone else. BYD has already surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest manufacturer in the industry, and a whole generation of new Chinese brands are launching impressive, cheap models around the world.
With the Chinese manufacturers charging around £10,000 per vehicle compared with £30,000-plus for European rivals, it is not hard to see that they will soon dominate the global industry. To protect Volkswagen, BMW and Renault, tariffs will have to be applied. The trouble is, that will slow down the adoption of EVs, and make it harder to hit net zero.
In reality, when Europe’s political elite went all in on prioritising climate change over everything else it failed to notice that this would hand China clear industrial leadership. China already dominates global production of solar panels (at least 75 per cent), wind turbines (70 per cent) and heat pumps (40 per cent). Very soon it will dominate EVs as well.
At some point, the EU will have to decide about whether it cares more about climate change or protecting its industrial base. Very soon this conflict will be too obvious to sweep under the carpet.
*************************************************
True, Indianapolis Star, “Climate Change is not ‘Theoretical,’” but Its Connection to Extreme Weather Is
The Indianapolis Star (IndyStar) published a story claiming climate change is causing dangerous weather changes in Indiana. Climate change is a fact, but data shows, contrary to what is implied by the expert interviewed by the IndyStar, that neither flooding, nor hot temperatures have become more extreme or common in Indiana than they have been historically in the state.
IndyStar reporter Karl Schneider interviewed Gabe Filippelli, executive director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, for his story, “Climate change not ‘theoretical, or even debatable,’ an IU expert says. What’s the solution?”
“Climate change already is affecting the everyday lives of Hoosiers and experts at Indiana University are exploring potential solutions,” writes Schneider.
“We do have some significant short-term challenges and one of them is flooding,” Filippelli told Schneider. “We’re already seeing a lot more extreme rainfall events and … we’re going to see even more into the future.
“The other issue is extreme heat. We see an increase in extreme heat events globally, but also right here in Indiana …,” Filippelli continued to opine.
I say opine because the data on flooding and extreme heat in Indiana refute his claims.
Concerning extreme rainfall and flooding, data from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that Indiana’s single day record for precipitation was set in August 1905, more than 118 years of global warming ago.
Also, although records do indicate the mid-western United States is receiving modestly more precipitation now on average during the present period of modest warming than it did in the early and mid-20th century, this has not led to a worsening of flooding. In fact, in its most recent report the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it has detected no changes in flooding and that it can attribute no particular floods or patterns in floods to human caused climate change.
Concerning extreme heat, once again data from the NCEI refute Filippelli’s uncorroborated assertion that extreme heat is increasing. Indiana’s single day maximum temperature record, of 116℉ was set in 1936, 87 years of climate change ago. Indeed, more record hot temperatures in the United States were set during the dust bowl decade of the 1930s than in any other decade before or since, and far more record high temperatures for the country were set prior to 1950, before the recent period of modest warming, than have been set or tied in the past 70 years of climate change. Only six high temperature records have been set or tied since 2000 during what most alarmists call the hottest two decades on record. By contrast, 25 state maximum temperature records set in the 1930s still stand as records today.
Neither flooding nor extreme heat have worsened during the recent period of modest warming. Had Schneider checked the data, rather than relying on “expert opinion,” he could easily have established this fact and produced an accurate story, rather than one more in a long line of climate crisis scare stories.
************************************************
The 2023 Burning Man Rainstorm Wasn’t Caused By Climate Change
This year, the popular music festival Burning Man, which is held in the Black Rock Desert area of Nevada, was interrupted by a rainstorm that left many participants stranded. Wired and The Conversation, among other media outlets, attributed the rain storm, as well as the heat wave the area experienced a few weeks prior, to human-caused climate change. This is false. The recent rains were made more intense by the aftermath of hurricane Hilary, and neither “monsoon” rains, nor heatwaves, are an unprecedented or even rare in the region.
In a story posted by Wired, “Climate Change Has Finally Come for Burning Man,” contributor Chris Stokel-Walker writes that the downpour that trapped many festival-goers was caused by climate change. He wrote:
Extreme weather wrought by climate change, which is resulting in increasing amounts of rain being dumped on the southwestern US states at this time of year. “These sorts of heavy summer rainfall events in the region are expected, as the well-known southwestern summer monsoon is expected to yield larger amounts of rainfall in a warming climate,” says Michael Mann, presidential distinguished professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science.
A piece in The Conversation took a more balanced approach, pointing out that bad weather striking a festival isn’t new, that “[t]he legendary 1969 Woodstock festival in New York State was also a mud pit.”
Along with reasonably suggesting that festival planners take potential weather problems into account, The Conversation unfortunately also claims that “[a]s we heat the planet, we’re getting more frequent, intense and longer-lasting heatwaves across the world. We also know we’re seeing more and more intense short-duration downpours which cause flash flooding.”
These claims are also false.
To Dr. Mann and Wired’s credit, the summer monsoon is a real season in the southwest, and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has “high confidence” that precipitation in general has increased over the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. This has not led to more flooding, however, according to the IPCC as discussed in Climate at a Glance: Floods.
Heatwaves likewise do not appear to be getting worse in the United States, and data show that most the U.S., including parts of Nevada, have seen fewer unusually hot days, as shown in the post “Media Chases ‘Climate Enhanced’ Heat Waves, Misses Data Showing They are Less Frequent.”
Hurricane Hilary, discussed in the Climate Realism post “No, BBC, Hurricane Hilary Was Not Unprecedented,” undoubtedly had an impact on the amount of rainfall Burning Man saw this year as the remnants of the storm moved inland from its landfall as a tropical storm in Southern California.
The monsoon season is a regular event known to scientists and nearby residents. Also, this isn’t the first time Burning Man itself was disturbed by a downpour. A brief Google search reveals many articles and blog posts from as far back as 2000 that describe rain around the same time of year creating sticky, impassible mud. Anyone operates an outdoors festival in the desert Southwest during the monsoon season should not be surprised to get heavy amounts of rain on occasion.
This particularly sticky, slippery mud, is also a known feature of the dry lakebed Burning Man takes place in. Its primary composition is gypsum, silica, and bentonite-clay type dirt that can form famous white-out dust storms when dry, and soak up water and turn into particularly sticky mud when wet. When it rains – and rains hard – in the desert, a dry lakebed is not the place to be.
As discussed, many times by Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, these kinds of drought and deluge patterns are normal for the region; desert rain does not soak easily into the ground, it runs off and collects, leading to flooding, including flash floods, which are dangerous.
While there were certainly unsafe and unsanitary conditions at Burning Man this year, the weather that led to it is not unprecedented. Burning Man has been rained out before, and none of the conditions that led to the situation can be honestly attributed to human emissions of carbon dioxide, as outlets like Wired and The Conversation are implying when they claim this kind of rainfall is indicative of climate change. Data does not show that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent or intense in the Southwestern United States. Climate change can’t be causing weather changes that data show aren’t occurring.
***************************************
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
*****************************************
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment