Climate change in the dock

No single artefact did more to launch the climate change scare than Professor Michael E Mann’s famous – or should that be infamous? – 1998 hockey stick graph, showing an unprecedented and sudden rise in global warming. Widely criticised on many scientific counts it is again under fire, in a Washington courtroom drama significant for both free speech and climate science.

A 12-year defamation battle between Mann and the witty and acute conservative Canadian pundit Mark Steyn is culminating in Room 518 in D.C.’s Superior Court, after Steyn wrote a piece in National Review in 2012 referring to Mann as ‘the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus’. Scientist blogger Rand Simberg, quoted in Steyn’s piece, is also being sued.

For those who have followed the climate-change gravy train for decades, as I have, this will be a walk down memory lane. All the old stagers are there, either listed as witnesses or mentioned in despatches – Steve McIntyre (‘human filth’, according to Mann), Roger Pielke Jnr, Ross McKittrick, ‘Mike’s Nature trick’, Climategate emails, tree rings and bristlecone pines. Even the catchy harmonies of ‘Hide the Decline’, the cult hit song by Minnesotans for Global Warming, have rung through the court.

The trial is pertinent because climate scientists have long avoided debating the science, saying it’s ‘settled’ and they don’t want to give ‘deniers’ a stage, although sceptics say that’s because the ‘settled science’ itself is so full of holes.

The evidence thus far includes jaw-dropping moments, such as when Mann declared that he had not, to his knowledge, paid one penny for his litigation involving three law firms and multiple lawyers over a dozen years. No such luck for Steyn, and Mann’s dark money donors remain unknown. The graph was first published in Nature magazine in 1998, starred in the 2001 IPCC report and became the poster child for global warming alarmism; it’s foundational to the IPCC’s climate-change case, so there are plenty of deep-pocketed left-leaning vested interests at stake.

The trial is occasionally rollicking and hilarious, given Steyn’s theatricality and turn of phrase, but also ugly. The court has heard of Mann’s abuse against ‘deniers’ (his preferred term) as evidenced in emails and Twitter posts – no playing the ball for Mann. In one email to a Wikipedia editor, with Nasa scientist Gavin Schmidt copied in, Mann accused climate scientist Judith Curry of engaging in an affair with a married academic while a student. ‘Sleeping her way to the top’, as the defence lawyer characterised it. In fact, she was on university staff and the colleague had separated from his wife; Mann had to admit that his gossip was false. He was only human, he said. Those who cherish science as a noble endeavour need to remember that those who practise it are ordinary humans, and sometimes very ordinary. But don’t take it from me – check out Mann’s long history of belittling Twitter posts for yourself.

One is tempted to see Mann’s abuse as par for the behavioural course from a scientist who frequently and falsely claimed to have won a Nobel prize, even after the Nobel committee said he had not. The court heard Mann was the only person the Nobel committee had ever asked to stop claiming to be a Nobel winner.

As the litigant, Mann must prove he suffered damages. No witnesses so far have been led to testify to his career suffering. His salary has risen, he has jet-setted to many international climate events, published a number of books and rubbed shoulders with the Clintons and Leonardo DiCaprio, as is typical of the climate glitterati. Much time was spent on his suffering ‘a mean look’ in his local supermarket from a stranger, and he claims his grant applications failed precipitously after the alleged defamation. However, Penn State had been hit by a child rape scandal around the same time, involving high-profile football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was ultimately jailed, and even the university’s president was charged, convicted and jailed, having tried to hush the crimes; that may have dried up the money flow. The two cases are connected by Steyn and Simberg’s claim that a corrupt Penn State tried to sweep both issues under the carpet, to protect their stars, and brand.

Further emails read to the court have hinted at Mann’s motivation; he hoped to ruin both National Review and Steyn himself, ‘this odious excuse for a human being’.

The case necessarily touches on climate science. I was curious to hear how Mann explained the use of two different temperature sets to create the hockey stick, the first one from tree-ring proxies dating back to the 1100’s, showing flat temperatures and switching to the second record, using modern thermometers, in the 20th century to get the final uplift of the hockey stick ‘blade’. Seemingly the proxies had become unreliable in the 20th century around the point when they contradicted the thermometer record. This at the time reportedly prompted even Phil Jones of the East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit to complain that Mann was comparing apples and oranges. Well, yes. In court, Mann had no explanation for why the tree-ring data became unreliable in the 20th century, it just had, he averred. It didn’t seem to occur to him that perhaps it was always unreliable, given that the graph had also erased the well-attested medieval Warm Period.

It has also emerged that Mann’s Ph.D expertise is in geology, not in statistics. Nor did he consult a statistician over the creation of the hockey stick graph, which Mann compiled from tree-ring data gathered by two climatologists; in court he admitted his original calculations were ‘pretty crude’.

(A note: I am taking much of my information from the podcast Climate Change on Trial, a daily enactment and account by awarded journalists Ann McElhinny and Phelim McAleer. There is little mainstream reporting; if the podcasters err, so will I.)

Given the vindictive USD$83 million damages found against Trump in his case against serial rape accuser E. Jean Carroll, one cannot be optimistic about any jury trial in deep blue Washington DC. But Steyn is going down fighting, and one cannot but admire his guts and brio, even if his bank balance has been cleaned out. Sadly Steyn, representing himself, is now in a wheelchair, having recently suffered three heart attacks. If ever there were a case deserving funding, it is his. The trial continues.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/climate-change-in-the-dock/ ?

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Carbon ‘facts’ according to Green Dream Believers

I’ve seen the light – the truth about ‘carbon pollution’ in simple terms as explained by some Green Dream Believers and disciples of the new Climate Change religion.

So why am I still in the dark? I’ve always wondered how Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, Greens leader Adam Bandt, the nowhere-near-independent Teals, and a host of other climate change advocates keep banging on about ‘carbon pollution’ and how we must eliminate it to save the planet while creating thousands of new Green Renewables jobs.

I thought they were talking about carbon dioxide or CO2, an essential trace gas that now measures slightly over 400 parts per million or a minuscule 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere. Science confirms it has been present at much higher levels due to natural influences in the past when trees thrived and coral reefs proliferated.

From Wikipedia:

Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere were as high as 4,000 ppm during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago, and as low as 180 ppm during the Quaternary glaciation of the last two million years. [4]Reconstructed temperature records for the last 420 million years indicate that atmospheric CO2 concentrations peaked at approximately 2,000 ppm during the Devonian (400 Ma) period, and again in the Triassic (220–200 Ma) period and was four times current levels during the Jurassic period (201–145 Ma). [16][17])

How can they call it ‘carbon pollution’ when we know it is essential to all life on Earth?

How can they call it ‘carbon pollution’ when all living organisms breathe it out as part of the respiration process and then plants absorb it and return oxygen to the atmosphere as part of nature’s perfect master plan?

Well, just as decades ago in TV ads we were told ‘oils ain’t necessarily oils’, carbon pollution ain’t necessarily carbon pollution.

My re-education on how all this is really supposed to work began years ago, courtesy of a newspaper column I wrote where I suggested people who lie awake at night worrying about breathing and adding to the ‘carbon pollution’ need worry no more as there were a couple of ingenious devices developed which could sequester their own personal greenhouse contributions (at least from their lungs).

With a global population now approaching 8 billion and each human exhaling an average of about 1kg of CO2 daily, that’s nothing to sneeze at. In fact it inspired the developers of the amazing ‘Living Green Screen Mask’ hailed as a living, carbon-capturing face mask which also filters bacteria and the Binchotan (Japanese for ‘White Coal’) bracelet.

If you combined these colourful accessories back then, you would not only be noticed in a crowd (any crowd), but more importantly you would capture and store CO2, filter out microbes, generate feel-good negative ions, and ward off electromagnetic waves from the cellphone powered by the electricity you have just generated with your bracelet, all at the same time you are helping to save the planet. Or so I thought, when I passed the information on to readers with just a hint of sarcasm.

According to the angry nest of Green hornets and climate worriers I stirred with my helpful information, the CO2 that humans breathe out is not pollution. Some also said the CO2 spewed out by volcanoes was not pollution since it was natural and possibly responsible for higher CO2 levels in the past which was all good because humans weren’t responsible.

They were adamant that we were not contributing to ‘carbon pollution’ through breathing. Some mistakenly thought the carbon dioxide we breathed out was the same volume we breathed in, when in reality, through respiration we breathe out about four times as much.

Others said the CO2 we breathe out today is the carbon we ate yesterday and this was ‘good carbon’ seeing it was perfectly in balance with nature. Apparently it does not matter whether you are a vegetarian or a meat eater, the principle remains the same. Garbage in, garbage out, I guess (just like today’s climate computer models which churn out the desired predictions).

Now to their explanation of why we really need a carbon tax in the form of carbon offsets or whatever other form our leaders dictate. The same CO2 suddenly becomes ‘carbon pollution’ when it is produced by power stations, cars, trains, planes, or anything else burning fossil fuels and releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere. Here it upsets the balance of nature and drives ‘climate change’ – even though it’s only about 3 per cent of total CO2 emissions.

Water vapour is acknowledged by NASA as a much more efficient greenhouse gas and on average makes up about 10 times as much of the atmosphere, but there is no need to tax that because it wouldn’t be possible and also because it eventually condenses into rain which helps cool things down until the CO2 warms them up again. More water evaporates in a type of atmospheric global warming perpetual motion machine. (Or maybe it’s not really warming, some say it’s just cooling more slowly than it should.)

Trees are good as they help to restore the balance except when they were part of former climate-sceptic Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s direct action plan which apparently could not work as well as a carbon tax or a ‘carbon price’.

Simple really… We have been told for many years there is a scientific consensus that anthropogenic CO2 we emit is responsible for ‘climate change’ and this is accepted by ‘every reputable climate scientist in the world’. Julia Gillard said all that before she ended her stint as Prime Minister by pledging, ‘There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead…’ Before quickly changing her mind. Oops…

Albanese and his side-kick Bowen still sing from the same old climate change song sheet and are determined to speed Australia down a destructive road to ‘Net Zero’ emissions regardless of the cost to the economy and the cheap, reliable source of energy we once enjoyed. And don’t mention the naughty ‘N’ word which still remains on the banned list here. Meanwhile, other nations are increasingly turning to modern nuclear reactors as a better alternative that won’t have to be scrapped and added to landfill within a couple of decades.

There never was any climate consensus, with many eminent international scientists such as Richard Lindzen, Henrik Svensmark, John Christy, Judith Curry, Ferenc Miskolczi, Miklos Zagoni, our own Ian Plimer, David Evans, and the late Pro Bob Carter at odds with the unproven CO2 hypothesis. More than 1,800 scientists, academics and professionals have also recently signed a petition refuting man-made global warming and stating: ‘There is no climate emergency.’

It highlights the fact we really do need a proper scientific debate to sort out the claims made by the Green Dream Believers.

Oh and in case you’re wondering, the Green Screen Mask and the White Coal bracelet never set the world on fire, in fact, they quietly disappeared without a trace and failed to re-appear even during the height of the Covid Pandemic … funny that!

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/carbon-facts-according-to-green-dream-believers

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The Unfair Demonization of Plastic Bags

Sometime in the last ten years, the crunchy left decided that average people were far too happy and satisfied leaving the grocery store with 50 pounds of groceries piled in plastic bags. They decided that such joy is surely bad for the environment. So they decided to ban them.

I’m not sure that it was any more complicated than that. It’s been this way for a while, reminding us of H.L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Mother nature surely doesn’t like that so let’s just make it stop. We need more misery around here!

So some years ago, states started to ban them. We all had to revert to brown paper bags which tear and are awkward to carry. Clearly an inferior product. Another solution was to bring your own bag, which is invariably made of, you guessed it, plastic. So that was replacing one kind of plastic with another.

If you live in a blue state, you know about this very well. You have to keep all sorts of bags in your closet or car and remember to haul them into the grocery store. But then you forget and you have to buy more. Now you have two extra bags, and this is to add to your growing collection at home.

It’s all a bit of a peasant way to shop and that’s the whole point, to make you feel poor and grubby, which, for some reason I cannot understand, is very fashionable among left-wing, academic-influenced communities. They are saving the planet, don’t you know, and probably curbing carbon emissions to forestall the existential threat of... climate change!

Except that there is one problem. Freedonia Market Research—at the behest of the disposable plastic bag industry, of course—has taken a close look at New Jersey’s program and concluded that the new plastic bags you slog around require much more plastic than the old thin and brilliant bags we used at the store in the old days. They discovered that the new bags are used only two or three times by 90 percent of people, so of course they have to keep buying more and more.

So get this. These new non-woven polypropylene bags have increased greenhouse gas emissions by 500 percent. Whoops!

Probably none of this surprises you now that you read it. After all, the bulk of actual plastic related to the grocery comes from the products themselves. Think of it. Every bit of meat, everything made of bread, every box has a plastic inside for freshness, and even your vegetables are put in bags to get them to the counter. The whole place is a plastic mecca. How much difference would the carry-out bags really make?

The point, as it turns out, has nothing to do with actually reducing plastic consumption but rather imposing coercive behaviors that take away conveniences and replacing them with a virtuous signal that everyone can understand. They do this to us even when it makes no sense at all.

We should anticipate this effect by now. Name any policy you can think of that is designed to somehow “save” resources—wind turbines, electric cars, solar panels—and you can pretty much guarantee that deploying them will be less efficient overall than the process which it replaces. It just keeps happening.

The plastic bag frenzy of the last ten years has some odd twists and turns. Remember when the world was freaking out about COVID germs? In my community, plastic bags had already been banned but now the germophobic pearl-clutchers grew concerned that the polyester bags people were slogging into the store carried bad germs on them. Once that word got out, the city council instantly abolished the very thing they had spent years encouraging.

Suddenly the whole community was back to using disposable plastic bags at checkout, because they were deemed to be more sanitary than the stuff people were bringing in from outside. None of it makes sense but there it is.

So there were a few merciful months when we could bag our groceries the way we used to, slipping them in bag after bag and hurling them around our arms to the point that on two arms we could conceivably lug 100 pounds of groceries in without tears and struggles and fruits rolling all over the floor. Those were the good old days.

But once the COVID hysteria died down, and especially once the idea that the bug could live on surfaces was thoroughly debunked, guess what happened? The all-knowing city council issued a new edict that once again banished plastic at the checkout counter and poked people to dig up their old polyester bags again and bring them to the store.

In other words, they bounced from one bogus belief to another bogus belief and then back again, all in the name of signaling virtuous actions to save the planet and the human race from extinction. So far as I know, no one thought to do anything about the tons of plastic used to wrap food in the store. That is what it is.

The people who do this stuff are quite fascinating creatures. Let’s say they were in a Brazilian village and shopping for meat and stumbled upon a farmers market with open cuts around which flies were flying. They would be grossed out and not eat a bite. And yet here we have exactly what they are going for: no plastic, no energy use, no artificial anything. Still, they won’t touch it.

What classifies as clean and worthy to this crowd is malleable and largely socially determined, having nothing to do with science or even reality.

So will this new study make any difference in the New Jersey law? Absolutely not. The state government will go on its blind path toward stupidity without a thought. It’s how they do it, because pretending to care about big issues like climate change is far more important than doing anything actually to fix the supposed problem.

The plastic bag at checkout was and is a marvelous innovation: clean, convenient, and surprisingly recyclable as trash bags in the average American home. We should bring them all back and stop this ridiculous charade of bringing one’s own bags everywhere. It’s degrading and pointless—not that this ever stops the new breed of woke puritans who have seized control of our lives and standard of living.

Let’s conclude with a slightly amusing blast from the past. Remember when plastic straws were considered terrible and we should all carry metal straws? That was before COVID. Then a woman in England died after falling and impaling herself, which went through her eye and into her brain. Then a young boy who suffered a life-threatening injury when a metal straw plunged into his throat and artery.

And so now we use wet and soggy paper straws which aren’t really straws at all. Blech. What can we say but “man’s inhumanity to man”? At least the sea turtles are safe.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-unfair-demonization-of-plastic-bags-5576644

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Stop wasting water

Almost every river in Eastern Australia is pouring surplus water into the sea.

Despite this, only two dams have been built in Queensland in the last 20 years – the Wyaralong Dam (built 13 years ago), and Paradise Dam (built 19 years ago).

Droughts will come again and we will wish for another dam builder like Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whose government built at least eight dams in Queensland – the Burdekin, Wivenhoe, Hinze, Beardmore, Haig, Fairbairn, Bjelke-Petersen, and Eungella dams.

All that dam-building came to a halt in 1988 when the plans to build the Wolffdene Dam were scuttled by the usual suspects.

Taxpayers also spent some $460 million on preliminaries for the Traverston Dam, but then cancelled it when the infamous Peter Garrett rejected the project. And recently it was revealed that the Paradise Dam in the Bundaberg Region had faults in the wall and a new wall would have to be built.

So, while our water storages are stagnant or declining, our politicians support dangerously high levels of immigration as well as promoting tourism, games, and circuses, all of which add to the demand for water. The population clock managed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us that Australia’s population increases by one person every 50 seconds. They all need water.

And some fools want to use more of our precious stored fresh water to produce hydrogen fuels (every tonne of hydrogen produced by electrolysis consumes at least nine tonnes of fresh water). The ‘green hydrogen’ cycle needs lots of water and will always be a net consumer of electricity.

Climate alarmism of the it’ll never rain again variety resulted in the rash approval and construction of artificial desalination plants in Australia about 15 years ago. Recently, Hunter Water announced that it was going to spend $500 million on a desalination plant south of Newcastle. All desalination plants are costly to build and operate, and many stand idle most of the time. And of course, green politicians want the power to be supplied from wind-solar adding greatly to the costs and environmental destruction.

To let surplus fresh water escape to the oceans and then try to recover it using artificial desalination plants is the ultimate water stupidity.

Right now, Cyclone Kirrily is demonstrating nature’s power of desalination – sucking moisture from the Pacific Ocean and dumping it on land. This is free fresh water with no costs to taxpayers.

Sensible people have their water storage facilities ready – new dams and weirs built, silt cleaned out, dam walls and overflows checked, and no leaves clogging the tank strainers etc.

Australia must build more dams for flood mitigation, urban water supply, and irrigation. Most East Coast Rivers have surplus water that races to the sea during floods. It could be conserved.

And it is time to apply our engineering skills to building the Bradfield water scheme – it will certainly provide better returns to Australians than green energy dreams like Snowy 2 or powerlines from the Northern Territory to Singapore.

A sensible society would identify the best dam sites and have a long-term plan for acquiring and preserving the land rights needed for them. We do the reverse. Decisions are postponed until the need is critical. Then landowners with vested interests, green busybodies, and media stirrers manage to scare the politicians, and the water conservation proposal is killed.

Then the ‘No Dams Ever’ Mafia takes over, trying to sterilise the site for all future dams by quietly changing land-use or vegetation classifications. They search for (or manufacture) evidence of native title or endangered species, and declare national parks over critical areas.

Green destroyers have also grossly mismanaged stored water by insisting on excessive and ill-timed ‘environmental’ flows. This is a scheme where you build a dam to catch water and then try to manage the water as if the dam did not exist. It is very slow and expensive to get this lost water back from the sea using desalination plants.

Existing dams have two great enemies – silting which gradually steals their water capacity, and evaporation which continually steals the water itself. Our engineers can manage ‘desilting’ and the CSIRO could divert some resources from climate alarmism to reducing evaporation from water supply dams.

But most of all we need more stored water. The wet La Niña will inevitably be followed by a droughty El Niño.

Let’s find a new Joh who will build more dams.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/stop-wasting-water/ ?

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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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