Renewables and austerity can't decarbonise

The need for realism about carbon dioxide targets

If the British government declared the abolition of sin by 2050, commentators would be rightly cynical. The announcement last week that Britain will enact a net-zero carbon target for 2050 was instead welcomed, especially by “faith leaders”. Yet without specifying how it is to be achieved, setting this target is about as wishful as pledging to eliminate sin. It is not just a matter of cost – although £1 trillion is not small change (if you had been spending a pound a second and had now reached £1 trillion, you would have had to start when Neanderthals were still on the scene).

Too many Tories think that going green means getting into lucrative bed with the crony-capitalist wind and solar industries, putting profit-seeking lipstick on a subsidy-dependent pig. But this is a futile strategy, politically as well as practically.

In Britain last year, generously using the Final Energy Consumption metric, 4 per cent of energy came from wind and solar, 3 per cent from nuclear and less than 1 per cent from hydro, the three zero-carbon sources. The common misconception that wind and solar are bigger contributors comes from forgetting that electricity is just 20 per cent of energy: the rest is heat, transport and industry.

So eliminating carbon dioxide from the energy sector has hardly begun, yet the cost is already huge and bearing down especially on poorer people, while, as Professor Dieter Helm of Oxford University has pointed out, industry is voting with its feet and taking its emissions to China and elsewhere. It was not true that Britain did without coal recently: a grid interconnector was bringing electricity from Dutch coal-fired power stations, and industry was burning coal imported from Russia. (I hereby declare my indirect interest in a Northumberland coal mine.)

Even if we could figure out a way to run aeroplanes on electricity, or to use less coal to make steel (it takes a heap of coal to make a wind turbine), and even if we were to find a way to make solar and wind power available on demand, there just is not enough space either on land or sea to power and heat the British economy from these low-density sources, not without ruining the entire countryside: a point frequently made by the late Sir David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy.

The “extinction” protesters say we can do without meat, or foreign holidays. To Tories flirting with this kind of energy rationing policy, good luck at the ballot box – look what has happened recently in Australia, France and America to politicians who promised to push up energy prices to save the climate.

The people in denial in this debate are the ones who think we could reach a 2050 net-zero target with a mixture of renewable energy and hair-shirt austerity. Nor is nuclear ready to help without massive public subsidy. Fortunately, there may be another way, one that Boris Johnson should seize to put clear turquoise water between himself and green dreamers.

For the foreseeable future, fossil fuels will be crucial to sustaining civilisation. A way must be found to use oil and gas, but capture their carbon dioxide emissions – and have the industry do something more than signal its regret; to be part of the solution, rather than most of the problem. The technology for sequestering carbon dioxide, still hopeless a few years ago, is now progressing in Norway, Canada and Texas. Britain has a golden opportunity because the North Sea oil industry has left a network of pipes and wells ideal for injecting carbon dioxide into rocks, where it slowly dissolves. Government is on the hook for some of the decommissioning cost anyway.

What is needed, though, is not some taxpayer-funded boondoggle to pick a winner in carbon capture – because that approach usually picks the most politically well-connected loser instead – but the setting up of a market mechanism to discover innovative technologies.

Professors Stuart Haszeldine of Edinburgh University and Myles Allen of Oxford University argue that government should make all fossil energy producers and importers pay a small but increasing fee per tonne of carbon dioxide, not into the insatiable maw of the Treasury, nor into vague tree-planting scams, but into actual carbon-capture projects that work. Fierce competition would ensue to deliver technologies that capture and, crucially, store carbon for the least cost.

If Boris Johnson becomes prime minister and adopts such a policy, he can look the opposition in the eye and say: “Unlike you, I have a plan for how we might just get to net-zero. It uses the market, encourages innovation, does not hit the poor or reward the rich, and puts the obligation where it should be: on the fossil-fuel industry.”

SOURCE 




Growing evidence of wind farms’ horrific toll on wildlife: This time from India

Eagles, hawks, bats – these are among the most prominently cited avian wildlife regularly slaughtered by industrial-sized wind-power facilities that – thanks to taxpayer subsidies and state renewable-energy mandates — continue to spread like wildfire across rural America.

The affliction is by no means restricted to the United States, however. A new study sheds light on the carnage giant wind turbines are inflicting on wildlife in India. Researchers at the Indian Institute for Science at Bengaluru studied bird and lizard populations at three wind turbine sites in Western Ghats. They found that the mass killing of avian predators by wind turbines is having a “ripple effect” across the food chain, with lizards and small mammals adjusting to substantially reduced numbers of predators in the sky.

Wind Turbines: The New “Apex Predator”

As reported by the Daily Mail last November (and otherwise largely ignored by the media), researchers in India found almost four times fewer buzzards, hawks, and kites in areas with wind farms – a loss of about 75%. Startled by the data, scientists are now referring to wind turbines as “the new apex predator.”

In areas without wind turbines about 19 birds were spotted every three hours, while in areas with the spinning blades the number dropped to five. Fewer winged predators have been good news for the fan-throated lizard, a species found only in certain areas of the Indian Sub-Continent. The lizard is usually easy pickings for hawks, buzzards, and other birds, but with their numbers reduced by the wind turbines, the lizard’s numbers are multiplying.

“We have known from many studies that wind turbines kill birds and bats. They kill them and disrupt their movement. But we took that one step further and discovered that it affects lizards, too,” study coauthor Maria Thaker told the Daily Mail.

“Every time a top predator is removed or added, unexpected effect trickle through the ecosystem,” she added. “What is actually happening here is that wind turbines are akin to adding a top predator to the ecosystem.”

The study, which was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, compared populations of raptors and lizards on a plateau that has had a wind farm on it for about 20 years to an adjacent valley that has no turbines.

“Humankind’s Most Pervasive Influence on the Natural World”

A recent study by an international team of scientists found the decline of apex predators is” arguably humankind’s most pervasive influence on the natural world.”

None of this is of any real concern to green groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund, who parrot the party line that the real threat to wildlife is “climate change,” not industrial-scale wind facilities and giant solar arrays they have been supporting for decades.

While India has made great strides in electrification in recent years, much still needs to be done. According to official data, “only 1,417 of India’s 18,452 villages or 7.3% of the total, have 100% household connectivity, and about 31% are still in the dark,” Forbes reported last year.

India’s future should not be dependent on interment, unreliable, unaffordable, and, as we now know, environmentally destructive wind power.

SOURCE 





Having hitched their wagon to the unicorn of climate catastrophe, the Democrat candidates for president are caught between a rock and a very hard place

Each of these twenty contenders has to try to stand out from the crowd and they will not do that by saying “oh wait, climate change is not a problem.” But the shriller they get the less likely they are to defeat President Trump. This panic festival will be fun to watch.

Presumably Bernie Sanders had the lead going in. He has the big machine that almost upset Clinton. He would be perfect. At the risk of being crass and cruel I am reminded of a famous Gary Larson cartoon. The dog is trying to entice the cat into the dryer with a sign that says “cat fud.” The cat is looking in and the dog is saying “oh please, oh please.” That is how I feel about Sanders opposing Trump. (For the record I have and love both cats and dogs, but I also like Larson.)

But there are more of course. I have already written about “Beto’s two-headed climate change fallacy.” My esteemed colleague and sometime co-author Paul Driessen just did “Reality bites Joe Biden’s “clean energy revolution”” which is a truly fun read.

What would really be fun is if we could rush through a Constitutional amendment allowing AOC to run for president. But I digress.

What is this mob of candidates to do? Presumably they will roll to the left, distancing themselves ever further from the American people. At which point we find the President sitting in an unexpected place — in the center!

So when does this climate circus begin? Or will it?

Aussie skeptic Jo Nova put it best:

“There are a billion sensible reasons the Democrats don’t want a climate debate

And it’s not because they’d lose debating science. There’s no chance they would debate science every candidate already agrees there is a climate emergency de facto, or they’d be thrown out of the party. So, any debate would start with “what should we do” and instantly turn into a high risk competition to outbid each other. Who can promise more, squander more, or cry bigger tears on stage on cue?”

The Democrat candidate debates are about to begin. Will the climate issue rise, or fall, or be swept under the rug?

Reportedly this is the largest number of one party presidential candidates in American history! Here are the latest debate lineups. I do not see a 10 person debate getting anywhere fast, so this is just the beginning of the beginning.

SOURCE 





La Transition Énergétique: “Pointless, Costly and Unfair”

A top French economist has slammed his country’s attempts to decarbonise its economy. `Professor Rémy Prud’homme accuses the government of wasting money on schemes that will make almost no difference to the climate and will cause great harm to the poor.

France already has relatively low carbon dioxide emissions because it gets most of its electricity from low-carbon sources like nuclear and hydro. But despite this the French government has embarked on a programme of building renewables. As Professor Prud’homme explains:

“We are spending billions to switch from reliable low-carbon nuclear power to unreliable low-carbon renewables. This will almost certainly increase our carbon dioxide emissions rather than reduce them.”

And the policies put in place are hitting the poor very hard, particularly those living in rural areas.

“The government is forcing up the price of energy everywhere. There are some subsidy schemes to reduce the impact on the poorest, but these cannot do nearly enough to soften the blow, as the Gilets Jaunes protests have shown us.”

The protests, now in their thirtieth week, and in which more than 4000 people have been injured, began as a demonstration against fuel price increases imposed as part of the government’s decarbonisation drive.

SOURCE 





Australia: New reef envoy Warren Entsch takes aim at 'coaching' of kids over climate change

The new Special Envoy for the Great Barrier Reef has declared the World Heritage site doesn't need "saving", while taking a swipe at climate change activists for "indoctrinating" school students who protest the issue in Australia.

Queensland MP Warren Entsch, who was appointed to the new role on Sunday, acknowledged climate change was a challenge for the reef, but said his priority is to reduce plastic in Australia's oceans.

But Mr Entsch said he was unmoved by student climate protesters who frequently targeted his electorate office, saying he had witnessed adults "coaching" some of the young people involved ahead of visiting his office.

"They're frightening the living hell out of kids. It's like child abuse and I think they should be held accountable," he told SBS News on Tuesday. He said "hostile" and "dishonest" activists were "giving kids nightmares because they don't believe there's a future".

Climate strikers have targeted the outspoken MP who represents the electorate of Leichhardt which covers Cairns and far north Queensland.

"One of them was almost in tears, as far as she was concerned the reef was dead in 10 years ... They only spoke in slogans 'save the reef', 'stop Adani' and '100 per cent renewables by 2030'."

He said Australia needed "solutions not slogans" around climate change.

But he dismissed the idea the Great Barrier Reef was facing any kind of existential threat, instead declaring his mission is to reduce the amount of plastic in Australia's oceans.

"We don't need to 'save the reef'. The reef is functioning well. There are lots of challenges. We need to continue to manage it and meet all those challenges," he said.

He nominated curbing plastics in the oceans as the main challenge he hoped to address as envoy, committing to a national policy on plastics.

SOURCE 

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************

Watch: Skeptical scientist wins rare New York City climate debate against warmist scientist – Audience flips from warmist views to skeptical after debate

The Soho Forum, Published on May 6, 2019

Resolution: There is little or no rigorous evidence that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming and threatening life on the planet.

For the affirmative:

Craig Idso is the founder, former president, and currently chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. The Center was founded in 1998 as a non-profit public charity dedicated to discovering and disseminating scientific information pertaining to the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide enrichment on climate and the biosphere.

Dr. Idso’s research has appeared many times in peer-reviewed journals, and is the author or coauthor of several books, including The Many Benefits of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment (Vales Lake Publishing, LLC, 2011), CO2, Global Warming and Coral Reefs (Vales Lake Publishing, LLC, 2009).

Dr. Idso also serves as an adjunct scholar for the Cato Institute and as a policy advisor for the CO2Coalition, the Heartland Institute and the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.

For the negative:

Jeffrey Bennett is an astrophysicist and educator. He has focused his career on math and science literacy. He is the lead author of bestselling college textbooks in astronomy, astrobiology, mathematics, and statistics, and of critically acclaimed books for the general public on topics including Einstein’s theory of relativity, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the importance of math to our everyday lives.

Other career highlights include serving two years as a Visiting Senior Scientist at NASA Headquarters, proposing and helping to develop the Voyage Scale Model Solar System that resides on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and creating the freeTotality app that has helped tens of thousands of people learn how to view a total solar eclipse.

His book A Global Warming Primeris posted freely online at www.globalwarmingprimer.com.





Moderator: "We have the final vote. The yes vote on the resolution that there is no evidence that's causing dangerous global warming: It began at 24% (of the skeptical yes vote supporting that position) and it went up to 46% (after the debate). So [skeptical argument] gained 22% points. That's the number to beat (46%).

The no resolution (warmist position) started at 29%. It went up to 41% or up 11 points." The winner of the debate is skeptical scientist Dr. Craig Idso with his resolution asserting that "There is little or no rigorous evidence that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming and threatening life on the planet."

Flashback 2007: Scientific Smackdown: Skeptics Voted The Clear Winners Against Global Warming Believers in Heated NYC Debate – RealClimate.org’s Gavin Schmidt appeared so demoralized that he mused that debates equally split between believers of a climate ‘crisis’ and scientific skeptics are probably not “worthwhile” to ever agree to again.





A Red Team review of climate crisis assertions

Gavin Schmidt’s spat with Steve Koonin underscores why we need to debate climate change

Paul Driessen

Various scientists, politicians and activists have long insisted that the United States and world must end fossil fuel use to prevent dangerous manmade global warming, climate change and extreme weather disasters. They say “the science is settled” and the time to act is now.

Many other experts have pointed out that these dire threats are the product of hypotheses and computer models that are largely contradicted by actual observations and historic records for temperatures, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, droughts, Arctic and Antarctic ice fluctuations, and rates of sea level rise. They note that Earth and humanity have been through Pleistocene ice ages and a Little Ice Age, Roman and medieval warm periods, prolonged droughts and other events that greenhouse gas theory cannot explain – and so far will not try to explain.

Call these experts “manmade climate crisis skeptics.” They say no drastic measures on energy should be taken unless and until these contradictions are fully addressed by open, robust discussions that climate crisis advocates refuse to have. “If your evidence for a crisis is so solid,” the skeptics argue, “you should be happy to lay it on the table, subject it to scrutiny, question our experts, and let us question your experts – rigorously.”

No debate, no proof of a manmade crisis – then no taxing, shackling or eliminating fossil fuel use.

The impasse has led to calls for a Red Team exercise or Presidential Committee on Climate Science to review and evaluate the climate models, reports, and evidence for and against the hypothesis that human carbon dioxide and methane emissions are responsible for a seemingly endless list of temperature, weather, ice, plant and animal conditions, fluctuations and catastrophes in recent decades.

Steven Koonin is a physicist, New York University’s professor, director of NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, and former Obama Undersecretary for Science at the US Department of Energy. A true scientist who is committed to the scientific method (proving hypotheses with actual evidence and reproducible experiments), he originated the idea of conducting a Red Team exercise.

Dr. Koonin recently gave a videotaped talk at Purdue University on the need for that exercise. He acknowledged that a lot of the government reports on climate issues are correct or accurate. However, he also said he wouldn’t be urging a Red Team exercise if he didn’t think the reports contain “misleading crucial aspects.” Some reports, he suggested, seem to be “written more to persuade than to inform.”

Based on his “thirty years’ experience in providing advice to policy makers about science,” he observed, “that’s not where we want to be. It’s OK to write an advocacy document, but not one bearing the mantle of science. I believe the reports have that problem.”

His Purdue talk focused on “the disconnect between what the reports actually say and the public/political dialog.” A Red Team exercise, on the other hand, would “point out exactly how the reports promote that disconnect” – by failing to provide historical or quantitative context, for example, or ignoring economic impacts of constraining fossil fuel use. His observations make eminent sense.

Gavin Schmidt took issue with Koonin’s comments – and weighed in with a critique on the RealClimate climate crisis website that he launched and manages. Dr. Schmidt is a British climatologist, climate modeler, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and supporter of manmade climate crisis ideas.

Dr. Koonin has now responded to Dr. Schmidt – in a fascinating point-by-point rebuttal posted on WattsUpWithThat.com, the internet’s most visited “climate skeptic” website.

Anyone interested in this vitally important debate – over climate change, fossil fuels, a Red Team exercise, and the future of industrialized society and modern living standards – should read and ponder Koonin’s response ... and the hundreds of comments that follow.

These government reports – or at least their executive summaries – are being read, interpreted or misinterpreted, and used by journalists, activists, regulators, educators and politicians to drive the dominant (and dominating) climate chaos narrative ... and justify a drastic overhaul of our energy sector, economy, manufacturing base, living standards, and rights to make our own personal choices about what cars we can drive and how far, whether we can fly for business or pleasure, what kinds of homes we can live in and where, what kinds of food we can eat, and numerous other fundamental issues.

One additional fundamental issue, of course, is that China, India and other rapidly growing economies are building fossil fuel power plants, factories and vehicles at a furious pace – and have no intention of slowing, much less stopping or reversing, their programs. As a result, their CO2 emissions now dwarf US emissions and in fact now total almost 62% of global emissions. So even total elimination of US fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions would have zero effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.

With that much at stake, we darned well better have solid, evidence-based science to support claims that we face ... or are already in the midst of ... an unprecedented climate cataclysm, of our own making, that threatens civilization, wildlife and planet. So far, all we have are fear-inducing computer models, headlines, highly questionable reports from US, EU and UN government agencies, unbending assertions that the science is settled, steadfast refusals to debate any of this – and nothing else.

The NYU professor begins his rebuttal by saying he is “grateful for [Schmidt’s] attention and comments, as I’m always trying to improve my presentations. It seems that I failed to get my points across in some crucial places, so I’ve got work to do.” But he will not let Schmidt’s unwarranted criticism go unchallenged.

As Dr. Koonin points out, his Purdue discussions of “modeling challenges and deficiencies, temperature extremes, sea level rise, hurricanes, economic impacts, and the challenge of effective mitigation were all based upon what’s in the reports themselves, the refereed literature, or widely acknowledged data. So I’m not surprised that [Schmidt] ‘sees absolutely nothing new here.’ However, much of my [student] audience was wide-eyed and, I hope, inspired to investigate further on their own.”

Dr. Schmidt apparently does not agree – and yet tarnishes his rebuttal with nitpicking criticisms and by frequently misquoting or misinterpreting Dr. Koonin’s remarks at Purdue, sometimes with an abundance of snark and, one gets the impression, at other times with intention or even malice aforethought, to make Koonin look bad.

Koonin concludes with the spot-on observation that many of the reports “continue to paint a demonstrably deficient picture of the science [of climate change]. The scientific community needs to fix that, both to better inform the decision makers and also to bolster the integrity of the people and institutions that produce the reports. A Red Team exercise would go a long way toward that end.”

President Trump needs to launch that exercise, via a Climate Change Committee or similar program. If he fails to do so, it will be only a matter of time before our country and lives are shackled by intrusive, intolerant, economically and environmentally destructive Green New Deal regimes.

Read the Koonin commentary, watch the video, and read the comments (such as Tom Abbott, June 17, at 7:00 pm and Geoff Sherrington at 5:18 pm). You’ll learn a lot – more than alarmists want you to know.

Via email





Trump EPA finalizes rollback of key Obama climate rule that targeted coal plants

The Trump administration Wednesday issued a new rule that cuts carbon emissions from power plants by less than half of what experts say is needed to avoid catastrophic global warming.

The Affordable Clean Energy rule, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, represents the Trump administration’s most significant action to unwind federal regulations aimed at addressing climate change. At the EPA on Wednesday, Trump’s top aides, Republican lawmakers and state business leaders celebrated it as proof that the president had delivered for his constituents in coal country.

“That means cleaner and more affordable energy for the American public,” said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, addressing a group that included coal miners from Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Under the Trump rule, utilities are expected to cut emissions 35 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the next decade. But to avoid global average temperatures from rising beyond 2 degrees Celsius, the U.S. electricity sector would need to cut its emissions 74 percent, according to the International Energy Agency.

Unlike the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, the new rule does not set specific greenhouse gas emissions cuts for each state. Instead, it allows state regulators to determine how utilities can improve efficiency and will not force companies to switch from coal to lower-carbon energy sources.

But market forces have already prompted many utilities to cut back on coal.

DTE Chairman and CEO Gerry Anderson, whose Detroit-based utility has pledged to cut its carbon output 80 percent by 2040, said the new regulation won’t affect the decision to shutter 14 of its 18 coal-fired units by the end of the decade. “The industry’s in motion, and it’s got its own life,” Anderson said in an interview. “We’re moving on, and the rest of the industry is in a similar direction.”

Critics of the Trump rule argue that because it doesn’t require a move away from coal, some utilities will leave their plants open for longer, producing more pollution. They also say the new rule will result in even more confusion as states set their own climate agendas.

While liberal states are adopting ambitious climate policies, more conservative ones might not allow power companies to pass on carbon-free investment costs to customers if there’s no federal mandate to cut emissions.

Either way, the U.S. power sector is on track to surpass the Trump emissions projections, which amount to about one-third less than 2005 levels. Last year, utilities had lowered their emissions by 27 percent, and many companies plan to go even further, cutting carbon dioxide in half by 2030.

SOURCE 





The Growing Drive To Destroy The Beef Industry

The American beef industry has long been a tasty target of the environmentalists and their allies in the animal rights movement. To understand the reason is to know that protecting the environment is not the goal, rather the excuse in a determined drive for global power. Their selected tactic is to control the land, water, energy, and population of the Earth. To achieve these ends requires, among other things, the destruction of private property rights and elimination of every individual’s ability to make personal lifestyle choices, including personal diet.

Of course, no totalitarian-bound movement would ever put their purpose in such direct terms. That’s where the environmental protection excuse comes in. Instead, American cattle producers are simply assured that no one wants to harm their industry, just make it safer for the environment. The gun industry might recognize that such assurance sounds a bit familiar. Same source, same tactics, same goals.

So the offered solution to “fix” the beef industry is “sustainable certification”. All the cattle growers have to do, they are assured, is follow a few simple rules and all will be fine, peaceful and profitable. Enter the players: the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB), and the U.S, Department of Agriculture.

First, let’s reveal the Sustainablists’ stated problems with the beef industry. What’s not sustainable about raising beef? According to the environmental “experts”, there are ten reasons why the meat industry does not meet sustainable standards:

* Deforestation – the claim is that farm animals require considerably more land than crops to produce food. The World Hunger Program calculated that if the land was used to grow grain and soy instead of cattle the land could provide a vegan diet to 6 billion people. Do you get that – a vegan diet! The fact is, most grazing land in the U.S. cannot be used for growing food crops because the soil wouldn’t sustain crops.

* Fresh Water – they claim that the America diet requires 4,200 gallons of water per day, including animal drinking water, irrigation of crops, processing, washing, etc. Whereas a vegan diet only requires 300 gallons per day. Apparently they don’t plan to irrigate the land to grow wheat or to wash the vegetables.

* Waste Disposal – factory farms house hundreds of thousands of animals that produce waste. They claim these giant livestock farms produce more than 130 times the amount of waste humans do. The interesting thing about this detail is that the actual sustainable policies they are enforcing to fix this problem destroy the small family farms in favor of the very giant corporate factory farms they profess to oppose. In addition, those global corporations which join the Green cabal have the ability to ignore many of the “sustainable” restrictions, unlike the small, family farms that are much better at protecting the environment on their own.

* Energy Consumption - For the steak to end up on your plate, say the Greens, the cow has to consume massive amounts of energy along the way as the cattle are transported thousands of miles to slaughter, market, and refrigerate. And let’s not forget, the meat must then be cooked! Well this transportation argument is a direct result of the existence of a limited few packing companies in cahoots with the Green Lords that dictate the market as they work against a more decentralized, local industry. Meanwhile, last time I checked, Tofurkey – made from soy -- also has to be cooked!

* Food Productivity – say the Greens, food productivity of farmland is falling behind the population and the only option, besides cutting the population, is to cut back on meat consumption and convert grazing lands to food crops. As noted in point 1, most grazing land cannot be converted. Everything dealing with the sustainable argument is based on some unseen crisis. Yet we do not have a world-wide food shortage or pending famine. In fact, the media is persistently reporting “price-depressing crop surpluses.” The only places where such shortages may exist are in totalitarian societies where government is controlling food production and supplies – kind of like the Green’s plan for sustainable beef.

* Global Warming – here we go! Say the Greens, global warming is driven by energy consumption and cows are energy guzzlers. But there’s more to the story. Cow flatulence! A single dairy cow, they claim, produces an average of 75 kilos of methane annually. Meanwhile, environmentalists want to return the rangelands to historic species, including buffalo. And a buffalo, grazing on the same grass on the same lands would emit about the same amount of methane. It’s a non-issue.

* Loss of Biodiversity – What are some of the examples the Greens give for loss of biodiversity? Poaching and black market sale of bushmeat including everything from elephants and chimpanzees to birds??? Please explain what this has to do with the American cattle industry – other than a pure hatred of anyone who eats meat of any kind. And that, of course, is the argument from the animal rights/vegan wing of the Green movement that is leading the assault on cattle.

* Grassland Destruction – apparently this is based on the Green premise that domesticated animals like cows replaced bison and antelope, which, in turn, caused a loss of biodiversity of species. I’ve got two pieces of news for you. First, the Native Americans so revered by the Greens, hunted bison before the white man arrived. Take a trip to Bozeman, Montana and see the cliff where they used to run entire herds to their death, not just selectively choosing a few to eat. Second, the Greens, not the cattle ranchers, forced the reintroduction of wolves, and that has caused a near annihilation of the antelope and elk herds.

*Soil Erosion – the Greens claim that U.S. pastureland is overgrazed, causing soil erosion. In truth, a great many of today’s cattlemen are third and fourth generation on their land. Those ranches could not have existed for over a hundred years if they were so careless in taking care of the land. It is vital to their survival to assure the land stays in good shape. Of course, an environmentalist who has never worked a ranch or farm and rarely comes out of his New York high-rise might not know that.

* Lifestyle Disease – this is my favorite of the reasons why beef is supposedly unsustainable. In short, it’s because of stupid people! This one is blamed on “excessive” consumption of meat, combined with environmental pollution and “lack of exercise” leading to strokes, cancer, diabetes and heart attacks. So it’s the beef industries fault that people eat too much and refuse to exercise. The solution – ban meat consumption. Yet, doctors are now realizing that meat eating is not the problem, carbs are.

So, these are the ten main reasons why it’s charged that beef is unsustainable and must be ruled, regulated and frankly, eliminated. These are charges brought by anti-beef vegans who want all beef consumption stopped. In cahoots, are global Sustainablists who seek to stop the private ownership and use of land, all hiding under the blanket excuse of environmental protection.

To bring the cattle industry into line with this world view the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has accepted the imposition of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, which is heavily influenced, if not controlled, by the World Wildlife Fund, one of the top three most powerful environmental organizations in the world and a leader in the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), which basically sets the rules for global environmental policy. This is the same World Wildlife Fund that issued a report saying, “Meat consumption is devastating some of the world’s most valuable and vulnerable regions, due to the vast amount of land needed to produce animal feed.” The report went on to say that, to save the Earth, it was vital that we change human consumption habits away from meat. As pointed out earlier, the fact is most land used for grazing isn’t capable of growing crops for food. Further, to have the WWF involved in any part of the beef industry is simply suicidal.

It’s interesting to note that the “Principles for Sustainable Beef Farming,” issued for the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef by the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Working Group (SAI), follow the exact guidelines originally presented in the United Nations’ Agenda 21/ Sustainable Development blueprint. Agenda 21 divided these into three categories including, Social Equity, Economic Prosperity and Ecological Integrity. Using almost identical terms, the SAI plan for Sustainable Beef uses the following headings for each section of its plan: Economic Sustainability, Social Sustainability, and Environmental Sustainability.

Under Social Sustainability are such items as Human Rights, Worker Environment, Business Integrity, and Worker Competence (that means that workers are required to have the proper, acceptable sustainable attitudes and beliefs). Under the heading Environmental Sustainability are Climate Change, Waste, and Biodiversity, for the reasons already discussed.

Regulations using these principles impose a political agenda that ignores the fact that smaller, independent cattle growers have proven to be the best stewards of their own land and that for decades have produced the highest grade of beef product in the world. Instead, to continue to produce they will be required to submit to centralized control by regulations that will never end and will always increase in costs and needless waste of manpower.

To follow the sustainable rules and be officially certified, the cattle growers must agree to have much of the use of their land reduced to provide for wildlife habitat. There are strict controls over water use and grazing areas. This forces the growers to have smaller herds, making the process more expensive and economically unviable for the industry. In addition, there is a new layer of industry and government inspectors, creating a massive bureaucratic overreach, causing yet more costs for the growers.

The Roundtable rules are now enforced through the packing companies. You see, the cattlemen actually have no direct market. Instead, they first bring their product to feedlots for final preparation. The feedlots then sell the cattle to the packers. The packers are the ones who then have direct contact with stores, restaurants and other entities that actually buy the beef. The packers are a major force in the Roundtable, working side by side with the WWF, and so dictate the rules to the feedlots to comply with sustainable certification for the cattle they will buy from the growers. If the beef they obtain isn’t grown according to the sustainable beef principles then the packers refuse to buy it. That has quickly put smaller feedlots out of business. Consequently, it also destroys the cattle growers who rely on the feedlots to take their product.

There are only four main packing companies in the United States. These are Cargill, Tysons, JBS and Marfrig. These packers have already successfully taken control of the hog and poultry industries. Tysons is now raising its chickens in China to ship here. JBS and Marfrig are both from Brazil. It’s interesting to note that one of their first tactics was to remove the country of origin labeling from the packaging so that consumers have no idea where their product is coming from. So as the packers force their expensive, unnecessary, and unworkable sustainable certification on American cattlemen, they are systematically bringing in cheaper product from other countries that don’t necessarily adhere to strict, sanitary, safe production American producers are known for. As a result, there is a noticeable rise in news reports of recalls of diseased chicken and beef in American grocery stores.

Some cattle growers have tried to fight back by creating new packing companies to compete and provide an honest market. However, the costs to do so are huge, as high as $50 million. One such company called Northern Beef Packers was formed, using all the latest state of the art, high-grade processing. The four established packers reacted by drastically reducing their prices to the grocers, thereby destroying any hope of establishing a market for the new packing company.

This then is the situation that is threatening the American beef industry. If one reads the documents and statements from the World Wildlife Fund, the United Nations Environment Program and others involved, it is not hard to realize that the true goal is not to produce a better grade of beef, but to ban it altogether. The question must then be asked, why is the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association allowing this to happen, and indeed, is joining with the Sustainable Beef Roundtable to force these policies on their members?

The answer is actually quite tragic. American ranchers, farmers and livestock growers have been targets of the environmental and animal rights movements for years. They are beaten down. Like the rest of us they just want to be left alone to work their farms and herds like their forefathers have done for more than a century. But the pressure is growing day by day. So, they have come to believe that if they just go along – put the sustainable label on their product -- then this pressure will stop. In short, they see it as a pressure valve.

The reality is it’s not going to go away because the goal is not environmental protection, rather the destruction of their industry and control through what the UN calls the reorganization of human society. The attack has now grown to major proportions with the Green New Deal. Beef eaters have no place in the sustainable paradise of city apartment dwellers who accept government controls to choose for them what they are permitted to eat.

There are efforts to fight back. A group of cattlemen has organized under the banner of R-CALF (Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund) and they have managed to slow the Sustainable capture of the industry.  But the packers’ control of the industry is a major roadblock if the cattlemen can’t reach their market. R-CALF has filed Abuse of Conduct suits to shed light on the anti-trust activities of the monopoly tactics of the packers.

However, the beef industry cannot recover on its own. There must be outrage from the consumers who are facing higher prices, possible inferior meat, and the danger of disease because of this sustainable tyranny. If you want the right to your own food choices instead of the dictatorship of radical Greens, then get mad. Demand that “Country of Origin” labels be put on all beef products so you know where your food comes from. Demand that the Department of Agriculture rejects this sustainable myth and protects the American free market that has always provided superior products.

The so-called sustainable policy is not a free market. It is a government-sanctioned monopoly that is just short of a criminal enterprise. Stand with American farmers and cattlemen. If Americans don’t fight back now we will lose the freedom to our own dinner plates in the name of sustainable lies.

SOURCE 





Climate activists are the establishment, not the underdogs

Comment from Australia

These well-to-do campaigners would happily make ordinary people’s lives harder.

On the eve of the Australian election last month, the righteous anger of modern politics turned to violence when a man was stabbed with a corkscrew.

His assailant, Steven Economides, is a senior 62-year-old partner at KPMG who lives in the Sydney suburb of Balgowlah Heights where the average three-room house costs around £1.5million.

The victim of this white-collar crime was a volunteer campaigner for former prime minister Tony Abbott, who stands accused of indifference to the future of the planet. Abbott was seeking re-election as MP for Warringah. Economides was a supporter of Abbott’s rival, independent Zali Steggall, whose call for real action on climate change is said to have won the seat.

Today’s typical Australian eco-warrior is affluent, educated and smug. These people are to be found in fashionable suburbs, frequently close to the water. They drive European cars, fly north in the winter and despair at the suburban bogans and their seeming indifference to the Greatest Ethical Challenge of Our Time.

The world looks somewhat different from the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland, where a proposal to develop Australia’s largest coal mine has raised hopes of economic activity and jobs.

The Carmichael Mine would be built by the Indian company Adani and would feed the increasing demand for coal-fired electricity generation in the sub-continent, the quickest and cheapest way to provide reliable power to a nation in which 18,000 villages still lack electricity.

The development has been frustrated by the largest and most sophisticated anti-development campaign Australia has seen.

The site of the mine is inherently unlovable, flat scrubby grazing land, plagued by drought, 400km inland on the edge of the outback. The campaigners responded by linking the development to the campaign to save the Great Barrier Reef. A powerful coalition of green groups, including Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, launched deceptive campaigns to persuade the public that the mine was ‘near’ or even ‘in the heart of’ the reef. In reality, the mine will be further from the reef than the North York Moors are from London

In its form, the strategy is little different from the campaign that successfully stopped the development of hydro-electricity in the early 1980s and turned tree-hugging into a professional enterprise in Australia.

The campaign to stop the construction of the Franklin Dam on the Gordon River was led by a young environmental activist named Bob Brown who supplied 16mm movies of pristine wilderness to television stations as a ‘weapon of conservation’ and instructed activists to put on jackets and ties in preparation for media interviews.

Brown turned the Franklin into an internationally recognised icon with the help of the support of David Bellamy. The turning point for the Franklin campaign came when the opposition Labor Party came on board, turning it into an election issue that would help it gain votes in inner-city electorates on the mainland.

Bob Hawke’s victory at the 1983 election came despite a swing against Labor in Tasmania, where the workers were less concerned about the loss of native habitat than they were about the loss of jobs.

It was the start of Labor’s uncomfortable alliance with green politics that hastened its estrangement from working Australians and remains a nagging source of tension between the party’s industrial and intellectual wings.

Some 36 years later, the environmental movement pinned its hopes on a Labor victory in the recent election to stigmatise coal in the same way it had effectively ended the development of hydro-electricity.

Queensland’s state Labor government was caught in a bind. Approving the mine would have risked the loss of inner-Brisbane seats to the Greens. Blocking it would lose it seats in central and far-north Queensland.

Queensland premier Anastasia Palaszczuk decided to stall, relying on the ability of the public service to procrastinate, hoping that an incoming Labor government in Canberra would take the decision from her, or that the backers of the Adani mine might pack up and go home.

Palaszczuk badly underestimated the strength of the popular revolt building in the regions and the suburbs. Nor had she foreseen that the Coalition would grant federal approval for the project days before calling a federal election, thus putting the pressure on Labor.

There was a growing resistance to the sanctimonious campaign driven by activists from the south who put parading their virtue above other people’s jobs.

The arrival of Brown’s Stop Adani protest at Easter served only to cement the anger of local people. The procession of SUVs and well-appointed camper vans arriving from the south was met with a counter protest by local people driving utes and tractors.

The anger expressed at the ballot box was devastating for Labor, which received just 27 per cent of the vote in Queensland, its lowest share of the state vote since the federation in 1901.

It took the state government a matter of days to absorb the message and make a swift about-face. Premier Palaszczuk ordered her bureaucrats to stop stalling, giving them three weeks to make their decision.

Late last week her environment minister announced that the project was approved and preliminary construction began at the weekend.

The Adani approval is a considerable setback for Big Eco, the international coalition of activists which had invested heavily in turning a simple mine approval into the last stand for coal. Tens of millions of dollars was spent on lawfare to stymie the approvals process and shareholder activism aimed at starving the project of funds.

It is becoming harder for Big Eco to pretend that it is the underdog, bravely fighting against bully-boy corporations. It is becoming clear that the very opposite is true.

Increasingly, the activists have the upper hand. They are well-funded, ruthless and professional. They are in cahoots with media professionals who mix in the same circles and adopt the same assumptions, but are estranged from their fellow Australians.

The Adani campaign has sharpened the battle lines. The climate-change debate is not a contest between science and ignorance, belief and denial, or good and evil. It is a clash between those rich enough to enjoy the luxury of projecting their virtue and those who simply want to get on with the job.

SOURCE 

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************

The Plastic We 'Recycle' Is Actually Horrible for the Environment

You can't win

When you drop your plastic waste into the recycling bin, it most likely makes its way around the world, where it can pose a health and security risk to developing countries, according to a new Guardian report.

The planet is getting buried under plastic: beaches are littered with it, sea life is choking on it, and a new report finds that we're even drinking a credit-card-size amount of plastic every week from our drinking water. Needless to say, recycling is a good idea.

Until it's done wrong. That plastic bottle that you drop into a recycling bin on the streets of New York isn't always broken down and crafted into a brand-new product. Sometimes, it ends up across the world in someone's backyard, taking its place among scores of supermarket bags and snack pouches. [In Photos: The World's 10 Most Polluted Places]

The U.S. ships about 1 million tons of plastic waste overseas every year. Much of that plastic used to end up in China, where it was recycled — that is, until the country abruptly stopped most of the plastic waste imports in 2017. Now, a good part of U.S. plastic waste is shipped to the world's poorest countries for recycling, including Bangladesh, Laos, Ethiopia and Senegal, the Guardian reported.

Last year, about 68,000 shipping containers' worth of plastic recycling waste from the U.S. were shipped to developing countries, which mismanage over 70% of their own plastic waste, they wrote. For example, Malaysia dumps or improperly disposes 55% of its own plastic waste, yet it receives more U.S. recyclables than any other country, they wrote. What's more, an estimated 20% to 70% of plastic waste that goes to recycling facilities worldwide is unusable and discarded as trash, according to the report.

Beyond just having to live among the trash that litters their beaches and streets, the increasing number of plastic processing facilities that are popping up in these countries is posing health risks to citizens who live among contaminated water supplies and the smell of plastic fumes, they wrote.

SOURCE 






Leftist Agenda and Climate Change Linked by Indoctrination Tactics

Joe Bastardi

Why is the same age group that helped to tear down the Iron Curtain now advocating for policies that would reduce freedoms?
   
As a meteorologist in the private sector, wherein success is largely determined by forecasting skill, I cannot afford to be wrong. I was taught that studying the past helps one predict the future. This is the origin of my involvement in the climate debate, since the “worst ever” bloviating we see today can easily be challenged through examination of the past.

My politics are simple. I believe one should have as much freedom as possible to enjoy life, liberty, and pursue happiness. In my opinion, the role of government is to establish standards to maximize these freedoms. I assume no one has anything against life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I also assume there is a large population of young people who are concerned about the future.

There is a striking difference between young people in this country today and the young people in the Eastern Bloc who actively worked to overthrow the communist chains that enslaved them in the 20th century. Young people 35 years ago yearned for the freedoms they saw in the West — the very ideals a growing movement in this country seeks to overturn. The US was a beacon of light to that generation, but now the same age group wishes to dim that very light.

Why do people now seek to push the West into a system in which government controls information? I believe it’s because of a lack of countering information that’s fair and balanced.

The issue at play is using climate as a means to an end. The crucial swing generation and those growing into it (the 6-19-year-olds of today) have only been exposed to a drumbeat meant to indoctrinate them. Indoctrination is a crucial aspect of totalitarian systems and comes about with a media working in tandem with a political agenda and an education system designed to feed one side of an issue. This is very similar to the same system that the young people in the Eastern Bloc worked so hard to get rid of, as many from those countries will tell you.

Check out this book that is being used in some elementary schools. In my opinion, it is pure indoctrination.



It was in part written by an author who wrote Do Fish Fart?

What do you say to an eight-year-old who comes home with this book?

If people knew and understood the power of the state in controlling information, they would be skeptical of what they are being told about changes in climate.

CO2 occupies 0.04 percent (.0004) of the atmosphere. Man’s contribution is ¼ that, or .0001 of the atmosphere.

The U.S. contributes 15% (.000015) to that .0001. Since this has occurred in the past 45 years, the yearly contribution from the U.S. is .00000033. The average state enacting Paris-accord-type agreements contributes .0000000066. This is all to save .01°C. But as Gina McCarthy said when questioned about that figure, that’s not the real value of the EPAs intention. Her exact quote from her 2015 Senate hearing (in which she did not know the percentage of CO2 in the air): “The value of this rule is not measured in [temperature reduction]. It is measured in strong domestic action, which can actually trigger global action to address what is a necessary action.”

The cost of such plans has been estimated at $93 trillion over 10 years by the American Action Forum. But do people who are buying into it know that? Do they know the physical properties of CO2 that limit its effects? Dr. Will Happer, who is chairing the president’s climate-change panel, certainly does, and it’s the reason for his stance on CO2 as a net benefit to the planet. It’s not a tipping-point prospect; instead, it’s a diminishing return, similar to putting extra coats of paint on a surface — because the bands it absorbs radiation in are essentially saturated already (it’s a very narrow window).

Besides, given the variation in both in the known history of the planet, can anyone tell you what the ideal planetary temperature is? Or the ideal CO2 level? The agenda means economic hardship for the U.S. I believe young people today are buying into this only because they are indoctrinated into a single way of thinking in the absence of opposing information.

When you hear only one point of view, there is plenty of reason to be skeptical, as people escaping from socialist societies will tell you.

SOURCE 






Without Mining There Is No 'Green Revolution'
   
The recent threats by Beijing to cut off American access to critical mineral imports have many Americans wondering why our politicians have allowed the United States to become so overly dependent on China for these valued resources in the first place.

Today, the United States is 90% dependent on China and Russia for many vital “rare earth minerals.”

The main reason for our overreliance on nations such as China for these minerals is not that we are running out of these resources here at home. The National Mining Association estimates that we have at least $5 trillion of recoverable mineral resources.

The U.S. Geological Survey reports that we still have about 86% of key mineral resources such as copper and zinc remaining in the ground, waiting to be mined. These resources aren’t on environmentally sensitive lands, such as national parks, but on the millions of acres of federal, state and private lands.

The mining isn’t happening because of extremely prohibitive environmental rules and a permitting process that can take five to 10 years to open a new mine. Green groups simply resist almost all new drilling.

What they may not realize is that the de facto mining prohibitions jeopardize the “green energy revolution” that liberals so desperately are seeking.

How is this for rich irony: To make renewable energy at all technologically plausible will require massive increases in the supply of rare earth and critical minerals. Without these valuable metals, there will not be more efficient 21st-century batteries for electric cars or modern solar panels. Kiss the Green New Deal and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ utopian vision of 100% renewable energy goodbye.

Yet, for decades now, environmentalists have erected every possible barrier to mining for critical minerals here in America — which we have in great abundance.

Search far and wide through the grandiose Green New Deal plans and you will not find any call for additional domestic mining for battery-operated electric vehicles and electrified mass transportation systems, nor the underlying energy infrastructure.

Thanks to the extreme environmentalists, we import from unfriendly and repressive governments the critical minerals needed to produce rechargeable batteries (lithium and cobalt), wind turbine motors (dysprosium), thin films for solar power (tellurium) and miniature sensors that manage the performance of electric vehicles (yttrium).

Another irony in the left’s anti-mining crusade is that these same groups have long boasted that by eliminating our need for fossil fuels, America won’t rely on cartels such as OPEC that have in the past held our nation hostage to wild price swings and embargoes. Greens also complain that fossil fuel dependence requires a multibillion-dollar military presence in the Middle East and around the world to ensure supply. Now we can substitute OPEC with China and Russia.

Here is one simple but telling example of the shortsightedness of the “no mining” position of the environmentalists. Current electric vehicles can use up to 10 times more copper than fossil fuel vehicles. Then, additional copper wire networks will be needed to attach convenient battery chargers throughout public spaces and along roads and highways. Do we really want this entire transportation infrastructure to be dependent on China and Russia?

Of course, it is not just green energy development that will be imperiled by our mining restrictions folly. Innovation and research on new lightweight metals and alloys — such as those used in life-saving medical devices and tiny cameras in smartphones — could also become stalled if foreign prices rise prohibitively.

Also, because our mining laws (the ones that don’t prohibit mining outright) protect the environment far more than those in places such as China and Africa, by importing these minerals, we are contributing to global environmental degradation.

So, there you have it. The “keep it in the ground” movement demanded by environmentalists against use of almost all of America’s bountiful energy and mineral resources is blocking a green future and a safer planet. Do they know this? Do they care?

SOURCE 





Climate change won’t be reversed in our lifetimes

The priority for governments should be to mitigate adverse effects.

In recent years, the public’s awareness of climate change has been growing by the day. Increased media coverage and protests by groups like Extinction Rebellion have captured a great deal of attention and persuaded many of the need for action.

Greater public engagement on climate change is certainly a welcome development. But there are also a growing number of myths and misconceptions that have come to underpin much of the debate.

There seems to be a commonly held impression that if Western nations like Germany and Britain reduce their net CO2 emissions to zero, climate change can be tackled in a relatively short period of time. For instance, it is not uncommon to hear that weather-related disasters – whether it is tornados in the United States, floods in Britain or bushfires in Australia – could have been avoided if only we had been taking stronger action against climate change.

In reality, even if humanity accomplished the Herculean task of reducing net global emissions to zero, a lot of damage has already been done which would not be immediately reversed. According to NASA, it could still take centuries for climate change to slow down.

Moreover, when you take a deeper look into the global-emissions data, emissions are projected to continue rising for the foreseeable future, despite the Kyoto Protocol and the much-heralded 2016 Paris Climate Accords treaty. Various organisations, including the OECD and Climate Action Tracker, project that global emissions will continue on their uptrend well past 2050, as developing nations continue to industrialise and raise their standards of living.

The unfortunate truth is that even if Western nations meet their pledges to reduce their emissions in line with the Paris accord – or to net zero, as Britain has just pledged – it is highly unlikely that there will be any meaningful reversal of the current effects of climate change within most of our lifetimes.

None of this is to say that climate change should not be addressed. But the top priority for governments around the world should be climate-change mitigation. As global CO2 emissions are guaranteed to rise, regardless of any unilateral action Western countries might take, governments need to invest in research, development and infrastructure in order to prepare for the worst effects of this.

Action on climate change needs to be built on a sound foundation of scientific facts and empirical data about what is actually happening to CO2 levels and the planet, not on the myths that have sadly become commonplace in the climate-change debate.

SOURCE 





Australia: Company warns of $1b wound from gas royalty hike by Queensland government

A major coal-seam gas operation predicts that the Queensland government’s shock move to lift royalties will cost it at least $1 billion more over the lifetime of a project.

The initial modelling from Arrow Energy, which is proposing a 27-year project, comes amid acrimonious debate about whether the gas sector should be paying more to Queenslanders.

Arrow is proposing a project based in the Surat Basin in southern Queensland that it estimates would employ 1000 people, churn out 5 trillion cubic feet of gas and require $10 billion in capital expenditure.

It is so symbolic that Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk described the project as a “vote of confidence in Queensland as a resources investment destination”.

While it was not threatening to cancel the work because of the rise, Arrow pointed out that its shareholders Shell and PetroChina were yet to make the final investment decision on going ahead.

SOURCE 

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************

Heatwaves could become more common and 'smash' temperature records in many parts of the world if climate change is not curbed, study claims

Yes.  It's logical that if temperatures rise globally they will also rise in at least some locations.  But will they rise globally?  They are at present falling globally.

And a rise of one or two degrees would not mean much.  There are already people living in very hot locations, much hotter than the present global average, e.g 40C. is common at Marble Bar in Australia


Current global warming rates will see large swathes of the world subjected to record-breaking high temperatures every year as the planet continues to swelter.

A study by Australian meteorologists has found that record-breaking heat events are occurring more regularly and will progressively get more common.

The poorest nations will be hardest hit, with 67 per cent of less economically robust countries having a record temperature every year until the end of the century.

Greenhouse gas emissions, at their current rate, will cause record high temperatures in more than half (58 per cent) of the world.

One in ten regions will also 'smash' previous monthly records by more than 1°C (1.8°F).

This sweating world is portrayed in a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change as the result of 22 different reports.

However, curing the world of a plague of heatwaves could be accomplished if carbon emissions are cut, the study authors claim.

The Paris Agreement has laid out clear guidelines for nations to try and cut their emissions in order to limit global warming.

It lays out two targets, which involve a maximum limit on rising temperatures , of two degrees and 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

If targets for 2020 are met then the number drops dramatically to just 14 per cent of the world experiencing record-breaking weather every year.

'The impact of emissions reductions on the total number of monthly records set is stark,' the authors wrote in the study.

'The benefits of reducing emissions, in terms of both reducing the pace at which high temperature records are set and restricting the magnitude by which records are broken, are very clear.'

Countries close to the equator, where the world's temperatures are always highest, will experience 24 monthly records broken every decade.

This falls to just three records every ten years under the low emissions version of events.

SOURCE





The Climate Jamboree Comes To The UK

The Guardian reports that the next ‘critical’ summit on the ‘climate crisis’ is to be held in the UK. Apparently, we beat the Italians to it. We are indeed truly blessed. The world will be watching:

"The UK is to host a critical global summit on the climate crisis at the end of 2020, at which the world’s 190 nations must commit to deep cuts in emissions.

It will be the most significant UN climate summit since the Paris deal was struck in 2015, when countries made pledges to curb emissions. But these pledges would only keep global heating to a 3C rise, which would bring devastating heatwaves and extreme weather."

This is our big chance to put the ball in motion and save the planet from the Three Degrees. Johnson (or whoever is PM at the time) better not fluff it. We’ll still be in the EU of course, so Britain will be told what to say and do at the conference by Brussels bureaucrats anyway. They’ll probably wheel in a decrepit looking former PM to talk about her stunning ‘legacy’ of zero emissions too – and the BBC will edit out the sniggering in Mandarin which will be heard in the background.

SOURCE





Merchants of Drought

A journal called Scientific American (or ScAm for short) hosts the latest blog from Kate Marvel, claiming that the “Hot Planet” is “Creeping toward permanent drought.” The subtitle is “Both trees and climate models are telling us the same frightening story”.  Most of the text is her usual substance-free emotional wittering: “The smell—a peppery sweetness, pine without Christmas—is what I remember when I think of home”, so I won’t bother to quote much of it, but here is the final paragraph:

"From my office in New York, I can look at these future projections and see California dancing from dry to wet and back again, until there is no again and it settles in to permanent drought. If the trees survive us, they may live to tell of a time where the grass turned brown, the map turned brown, and it was a long time before it was ever green again."

The “future projections” link here goes to a story from a few years ago when the “permanent drought” scare was at its peak, being promoted by the media and climate fraudster Peter Gleick.  Since then, California’s reservoirs have filled up and the “permanent drought” is now a subject for ridicule at sceptical blogs. So it is surprising that anyone would try to resurrect this fake news again.

Here’s a graph from a paper in Nature showing the fraction of the earth suffering from drought over the last 30 years. The different colours show different drought intensities on a 5-point scale from “abnormally dry” (D0, yellow) to “exceptional drought” (D4, dark red). It shows little change; if anything, a slight decrease in drought:



For the USA, there is a graph of the amount of drought on the EPA website, showing that there’s no trend and the worst period of drought was in the “dust bowl” era of the 1930s:



Finally, there is the latest IPCC report, SR15, published last autumn, which has this to say:



Is it possible that Marvel is unaware of all this evidence, and has never thought to look for it? Or is she well aware of it, and simply lying to the public about the approaching “permanent drought”? Either way, it’s an astonishing illustration of the dishonesty of the climate movement and the media organisations such as ScAm that publish this drivel.

Other climate scientists, of course, are quite aware of the falsehood of Marvel’s claims. In any normal, honest field of science, this pseudoscience would be exposed by others in the field. But in the institutionally dishonest field of climate science, the opposite happens. Bogus claims are promoted and described as “wonderful”:

SOURCE






High school climate indoctrination using AP environment textbooks

Jordan Peterson, a worldwide pop-culture self-help phenomenon and University of Toronto psychology professor, has repeatedly warned that “Liberal colleges aren’t about education; they’re about political activism.” It is widely believed and experienced by conservatives that our universities are doing more to indoctrinate our students than truly educate. What many people do not realize is the same thing is being done in our public K-12 schools.

I am one of nine elected directors on the school board in the Hollidaysburg Area School District in central Pennsylvania. Among other responsibilities, school boards are charged with approving their districts’ textbooks and curricula. In most cases, the books are rubber-stamped “yes” by the boards.

When my board placed approval of the Exploring Environmental Science for A.P book on the agenda for our meeting, I knew the voters in my district would want me to know what I was voting for, so I went into the administration office to look at the book. (There is a sheet in the book that you have to sign before you look at it. A day before the board meeting, my name was the only one on the list, even though it had been on display for the required 30 days.)

Since I didn’t have time to read a 500-page book in one afternoon, I went to the sections I knew could be the most problematic — that is, ideologically biased.

What did I find?

“Passive solar power is extremely efficient.” Well, yes, technically that is true. But it’s not the whole “efficiency” story, is it? What about the draining of tax resources through tax credits offered to direct consumer behavior to buy solar panels? That isn’t mentioned, because that is an economic and political question, which was not addressed (more on that later!)

What about nuclear power? A very clean and efficient source of energy? One recommendation in the book for the teacher to “educate” the class about nuclear was for the students to watch a YouTube video on the Chernobyl disaster. What better way to scare students regarding the development and use of nuclear energy? Does this put the use of nuclear power properly in perspective? Yet this is an advanced placement science book.

The book’s description of hydraulic fracturing — commonly referred to as “fracking” — was also charged with descriptors meant to frighten the reader, explaining the dangerous nature of the chemicals used in the fracking fluids. There was no balanced, equally emotive language used to describe the revolutionary development of this process, which a hundred years ago was not even imagined.

We have been told repeatedly over the past 100 years that we would run out of fossil fuels by the end of our or our children’s lifetimes. Fracking has enabled the world to have access to a whole new reserve of abundant and cleaner energy. I would think reasonable people would want to celebrate this instead of scare people about a made-up nightmare scenario about fracking fluids.

In one section of the teacher’s edition, it states that the goals of the section are to make the students understand that “humans play a significant role in the changing climate” and that “what is now inevitable climate change can be slowed by implementing drastic greenhouse gas reductions.”  Of course, there is no mention of the untold millions who will suffer by a significant decline in their disposable income due to rising energy costs and the necessary increases in taxes.

The beginning of one chapter starts with this quote: “Coal plant smokestacks that dirty the air and alter the climate will be replaced by solar panels on our rooftops and wind turbines turning gracefully in the distance.”  Does that sound like something that belongs in a science book?

The facts, ma’am, only the facts!

The book discusses the high cost of converting to renewable energy as our primary resource and recommends raising taxes as a solution! Remember, this is a science book, not a public policy or economics book! The book does not discuss the downside or opportunity cost of raising taxes to achieve objectives that many reasonable people deem to be of dubious value. The impression is clear: renewables = good; fossil fuels = bad. How about the opposite view that renewables = limited value; fossil fuels = unprecedented prosperity and the best human health in the history of the world.

This is not science. This is propaganda disguised as facts for impressionable teenage minds.

SOURCE





Poor timing for Al Gore’s climate panic poppycock

In politics, timing is crucial. And thus it was with the unfortunately timed participation of former US vice-president Al Gore in the Queensland government-sponsored Climate Week earlier this month.

According to the blurb, “Climate Week QLD 2019 will showcase how the state is transitioning to a low-carbon, clean-growth economy and building a community of action to address climate change.”

Occurring as it did after the unexpected victory of the Morrison government, Gore’s pronouncements during the week about the perils of climate change — let’s face it, he easily wins the gold medal in the boy-who-cried-wolf category when it comes to climate-induced apocalypses — were particularly jarring.

As for that photographed pose of Gore and Deputy Premier Jackie Trad cuddling up to each other, it’s probably best not to comment.

It would have been fun to be a fly on the wall when the planning for this gala week occurred. The expectation would have been that Labor would win the federal election, with the clear message that the public was demanding “real action on climate change” — so the motto goes. Reference would have been made to Bill Shorten’s plans to reduce emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 and for 50 per cent of electricity to be generated by renewable energy sources.

The Queensland government would endorse these targets while arguing for more ambitious ones. Reference would be made to the Palaszczuk government’s pledge for the state to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Without doubt, Big Al would be supportive.

Of course, the Great Barrier Reef would need to be a central part of the story. And the potential for the final rejection of the Adani project would complete a very satisfactory week of positive, vote-winning news items for the Queensland government.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone would give Gore the time of day. After all, he is not a trained scientist; he appears to make a living from concocting scary climate stories.

While he was in Queensland, he was offering up some more whoppers. Maybe he thought the appearance fee he received — estimated to be $320,000, paid for by Queensland taxpayers — necessitated the delivery of some sensational unsubstantiated claims.

To tell an audience that the choice is between Adani and the Great Barrier Reef is puerile and misinformed. To suggest that India is now sourcing 60 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources is just plain wrong — out by a factor of four to five. And these statements come on top of the many falsehoods Gore has peddled in the past. These include:

 * In 2006, he claimed that the planet would reach a “point of no return” in 10 years.

 * In the same year, he predicted that sea levels would rise by 20 feet (just over 6m) “in the near future”.

 * In 2008, he claimed that the north polar cap would be completely ice-free within five years.

 * In 2011, he claimed that polar bears would soon become close to extinction (their number has been ­rising).

Presumably, these faulty predictions were known to the organising committee as well as to the key politicians — Annastacia Palaszczuk, Trad and Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch — who supported the shindig. But Gore is a name and his discredited propaganda doesn’t prevent him from being a regular invitee to the annual conferences of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Recall that the last one was held in Poland during a particularly cold weather snap.

So now that Gore has left town on his private jet — no doubt some sort of carbon offsets were arranged — state governments and the renewable energy industry, in particular, are in the process of reconsider­ing their approach to climate change and their inter­action with the federal Coalition government.

There is no doubt that most of the renewable energy players were devastated by the May 18 election result. Their hopes, in descending order, were: Labor victory; defeat of Energy Minister Angus Taylor in his seat of Hume in NSW; and the appointment of anyone but Taylor as the next energy minister.

These hopes have been completely dashed.

A vitriolic, misleading and well-funded campaign was waged against Taylor, including the dredging up of snippets from his successful commercial past that were intended to cast doubt on his integrity — indeed, suitability for high office.

In the end, the self-serving, mean-spirited attempt to damage Taylor completely backfired and he was returned to parliament with a swing towards him. Not only does he remain the Energy Minister but his areas of responsibilities have been expanded to include emissions reduction.

One of the problems for the mendicant renewable energy players in dealing with Taylor is that he is just too smart and commercially experienced. He understands the industry like the back of his hand and is happy to query the sometimes faulty advice he receives from the bureaucracy.

He knows that claims that renewable energy-sourced electricity is now cheaper than coal-fired electricity are not correct and that Australia’s electricity generation mix will involve a range of technologies in the future.

He is committed to increasing supply and promoting greater competition to drive down prices. These measures are in line with the recommendations of the report of the Australian Competi­tion & Consumer Commission on retail electricity prices.

The renewable energy players will be forced to stand on their own two feet — for a change — and will need to adjust to the new reliability standards that come into play on July 1. Penalties are being imposed on far-flung installations and contributions are expected to fund the additional grid infrastructure required to hook up new wind and solar farms.

The salad days are over for the renewable energy industry, a situation ironically made worse in Queensland by the (temporarily stalled) requirement to use lic­ensed electricians for the instal­lations of large-scale solar farms.

The Palaszczuk government may be committed to a “low-carbon, green growth economy”, but that pales next to its devotion to trade unions.

As for the big energy companies, which also were hoping for a federal Labor win and had geared up accordingly, it’s time for a radical rethink.

Their campaign against the “big stick” legislation — the legislation contains a great deal more, with forced divestment the final option — is being quietly shelved. Co-operation with the Coalition government is now the name of the game.

Next year, Big Al should be able to stay at home. Indeed, next year there may not even be a Climate Week QLD — the state’s taxpayers deserve a break.

In the meantime the Adani project, unsurprisingly, has been given the go-ahead.

SOURCE 

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************

Shutting down middle and blue-collar America

From Biden to Warren, Democrat president wannabes push job-killing pseudo-green policies

Paul Driessen

Vocal activists increasingly drive Democrat Party positions across the public policy spectrum. Print, television, social and click-bait media generally support them, while permitting little debate on liberal proposals or their potential ramifications. Even semi-moderate Joe Biden has been pressured into shifting or flipping his positions on abortion, energy, climate change and other issues, to satisfy far-left factions.

Their policy prescriptions often find ready acceptance in coastal, urban, academic, media and big government circles. But factory workers, blue collar families and Middle America better pay very close attention to how climate change scare stories and proposed Green New Deal programs will impact their energy costs and reliability, jobs, living standards, mobility and personal choices. Warning signs abound.

Reflecting heavy dependence on wind and solar power, German and British electricity prices are already three to four times higher than what the vast majority of American households currently pay – and rising. The exorbitant prices have largely shuttered the UK’s aluminum industry and what’s left of its steel industry. Combined with ever-tougher carbon dioxide emission limits, factory operating costs similarly “threaten the very existence” of Germany’s automobile industry, Volkswagen’s CEO laments.

Nearly 350,000 German families have had their electricity cut off because they cannot afford to pay their power bills. German families and businesses had to cope with 172,000 localized blackouts in 2017. The country has banned fracking (hydraulic fracturing) and imports US coal and Russian natural gas.

In Britain more than 3,000 elderly people die every year because they cannot heat their homes properly, exposing them to constant chilly temperatures that make them more likely to contract and succumb to respiratory or heart disease. The situation is likely to get even worse. In stark contrast, abundant natural gas supplies from the fracking revolution have driven prices down in the USA, saving some 11,000 American lives each winter, according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study.

Multiple widespread blackouts over a three-month period in South Australia were caused by the elimination of coal-fired power, 52% reliance on wind turbines, storms, grid instability, and an inability to predict weather conditions or peak power demand. In May 2019, they helped persuade Aussie voters to replace their climate-obsessed government with a conservative coalition that supports fossil fuels.

China, India and other overseas aluminum, steel and vehicle exporters to the EU and US face no climate-driven energy price or emission obstacles. The Paris Climate Agreement does not obligate them to reduce their fossil fuel use or emissions for decades to come, if ever. Indeed, China’s annual increase in “greenhouse gas” emissions is greater than Australia’s total annual nationwide emissions!

Asia’s total GHG emissions now dwarf the USA’s. So even total, painful, job-killing, economy-shackling elimination of US fossil fuels would do nothing to end the steady rise in atmospheric CO2 levels.

Unfortunately, these hard realities have had no effect on people or companies that expect to benefit politically or financially from legislated energy upheavals rooted in manmade climate change alarmism.

New Mexico recently joined California and Hawaii in mandating “renewable” electricity: 50% by 2030, 80% by 2040 and 100% by 2050. Despite the absence of any state mandate, the Northern Indiana Public Service Company wants to replace 1,850 megawatts of affordable 24/7 coal-based electricity with 1,650 MW of expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar, plus 1,500 MW of backup batteries.

Modern factories, offices, hospitals, schools, households and cities cannot function or survive on starvation energy diets like these. Moreover, claims that wind, solar and battery technologies are clean, climate-friendly, renewable and sustainable are little more than useful fairy tales.

Wind and solar energy are certainly renewable and perpetual. However, the massive amounts of land and raw materials required to harness, store and utilize that energy certainly are not. And many rare earth elements, lithium, cadmium, cobalt and other high-tech metals are extracted and processed by Chinese companies under zero to minimal child labor, fair wage, worker safety and environmental standards.

But all this generally gets swept under the rug, while tsunamis of climate chaos scare stories terrorize children and even a lot of adults into believing human civilization, wildlife and even our planet face annihilation in less than twenty years, unless the world quickly rids itself of fossil fuels.

From Kamala Harris to Bernie Sanders, and now Joe Biden, every Democrat presidential candidate supports some version of the Green New Deal and would have us believe its authoritarian edicts and multi-trillion-dollar price tag are affordable and necessary.

Helping to drive this narrative is billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg – proud owner of twelve houses, a private jet and helicopter, and a fleet of pricey cars. He intends to give the Sierra Club and other activist groups $500 million to conduct new campaigns to eradicate coal power and block construction of natural gas-fired generators that would otherwise replace coal-fired plants.

In fact, no sooner is one example of climate nonsense debunked, than another dozen take its place.

After decades of frightening visitors with tall tales that Glacier National Park glaciers would all melt away by 2020 or soon thereafter, park rangers are finally acknowledging that the Grinnell, Jackson and other glaciers have actually been growing since 2010. They are now (quietly) removing signs, videos and brochures that featured the (Al) Gorey claims about catastrophic (Michael) Mann-made global warming.

Even the Washington Post has acknowledged that the number of violent (F4-5) tornadoes has declined 40% between the 1950-1984 period and 1985-2018 interval – with not one violent tornado recorded in the USA in 2018, for the first time in history. The United States also enjoyed a record 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes making landfall, between Wilma in 2005 and Harvey in 2017. Overall, actual evidence shows no upward trend in extreme weather, floods, droughts or sea level rise.

So now we’re being told plant and animal species are disappearing 100 times faster than historic rates, because of manmade climate change – and a million or more are at risk of extinction … out of some eight million that a new UN report claims exist on Earth. There are serious problems with this latest hysteria.

Scientists have actually identified and named only 1.8 million plant and animal species. The other 6.2 million “have no names, have never been identified,” and exist only as bits and bytes in computer models and fear-mongering reports and news stories, forestry ecologist and Greenpeace cofounder Dr. Patrick Moore observed during recent testimony before the House Water, Oceans and Wildlife Subcommittee.

Only 800 or so species have gone extinct in the last five centuries, Dr. Moore added – and most of them were victims of cats, rats, foxes and other invasive species introduced by European colonizers, or on small islands where native species had no defenses and could not escape.

Assuming this pattern will be repeated on a global scale, across entire continents, because of climate change, for a mythical 8 million species ... and plugging those assumptions into computer programs ... isn’t science. It’s garbage – designed and intended to justify eliminating the fossil fuels that provide over 80% of the energy that the United States and world use to produce food, jobs, health and prosperity.

We’re also supposed to swallow pseudo-scientific claims that “surging levels” of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide are creating dangerous hybrid puffer fish, making salmon unable to detect danger, making sharks right-handed and unable to hunt, making Arctic plants “too tall,” making coffee growing impossible in many countries, causing pigs to get skinnier, turning Earth into a super-heated Venus, causing the demise of tropical birds, and many other fearsome stories of White Walkers and Days after Tomorrow.

Sadly, all too many people soak up this nonsense like sponges. (Unkind comedians might suggest they have the brain cells of a sponge.) But to have these tales ... and the voters and politicians who believe and propagate them ... drive our energy and economic policies would be the cruelest joke of all.

Via email




Place blame for recent tornadoes where It belongs

Tragically, there is nothing unique about the number or severity of more than 55 devastating tornadoes that tore through the outskirts of Kansas City, swept through Indiana and Ohio, and stretched eastward from Idaho and Colorado across eight states late last month.

Nor, unfortunately, is there anything unique regarding all-too-alluring temptations for some politicos to blame such events on “climate change,” a term that has come to replace “global warming” in name only.

Flash back to Al Gore lamenting during a June 2013 Rhode Island energy and environment conference following a destructive Moore, Oklahoma twister that scientists “won’t let us yet” link tornadoes to climate change. Gore claimed that shoddy historical statistics resulted in failures to connect “these record-breaking tornadoes and the climate crisis.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., wasted no time attributing this latest raft of tornadoes to climate change after a hazard warning was issued for Washington, D.C. The New York Democrat immediately released an Instagram video. “The climate crisis is real y’all,” she said. “Guess we’re at casual tornadoes in growing regions of the country?”

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez added, “Other regions deal with wildfires, tornadoes, droughts, etc. But ALL of these threats will be increasing in intensity as climate crisis grows and we fail to act appropriately.”

Democratic 2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., blamed climate change for two tornadoes that hit eastern Alabama. Sanders posted a May 28 statement on his Senate Facebook account. Sanders wrote:

“This is insane: As Oklahoma and Arkansas face catastrophic flooding, and Ohio and Indiana reel from tornados, Trump is trying to undermine the very science that proves climate change is real. We need policy based on facts, not rightwing ideology.”

So okay. Let’s review some real scientific facts.

For starters, the 2019 tornado season wasn’t a result of unusually warm spring temperatures, but rather, just the opposite conditions.

As explained by meteorologist Dr. Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama, tornado conditions exist only when cool and warm air masses collide. Writing in Fox News, he notes that the perfect conditions for this existed this year after winter has refused to lose its grip on the western United States.

May temperatures across the nation were close to 2 degrees Fahrenheit below normal. In addition, atypical snow conditions extended from Northern Michigan through Colorado to the Sierra of California into late May. Together, these circumstances produced a persistently lingering cold air mass.

Tornadoes occur when severe thunderstorms known as supercells create spiraling updrafts causing strong wind shear at the boundaries between colliding warm and cold air masses. The warm air rotates upwards at increasing speeds until it punches through the colder air layer.

However, thunderstorms rarely produce tornadoes, and lacking cold air protagonists, they are virtually unknown altogether in hot and humid tropical regions.

Every year, springtime thunderstorms in Central and Southeast U.S. have plenty of warm, moist air to draw on from the Gulf of Mexico. This year, a large field of cold air hung around longer than usual.

Roy Spencer notes that a very slow U.S. warming trend in recent decades has been accompanied by fewer of these cold springtime air masses over the West. According to National Weather Service statistics, the long-term trend of strong (EF3) to violent (EF5) tornadoes has been decidedly downward, with 2018 experiencing record low activity.

This year’s spike in tornadoes is made far more dramatic in comparison with 2018 which was the first year recorded without a single violent tornado since record-keeping first began during the late 1800s.

Last year also experienced near-lows in terms of overall tornado damage.

The only better ones were 2017, 2016, and 2015.

Although NOAA reported a slow decline in tornado frequencies between 1954 and 2012, the actual annual numbers — those of weaker ones in particular — are uncertain prior to the advent of radar-detection technology.

Nevertheless, Patrick Marsh, a Storm Prediction Center meteorologist, reported that outbreaks of 50 or more tornadoes really aren’t uncommon, having happened 63 times in U.S. history. There are even three instances of more than 100 twisters in single years.

Roy Spencer reminds us once again not to conflate three decade or- longer climate cycles with seasonal weather which naturally varies from year to year. He writes, “The alarmist claims of AOC, Gore, and Sanders are not just speculative; they are opposed by our observations and by meteorological theory.”

As for that all too ever popular Trump-blaming mantra, perhaps he instead deserves some credit for making America’s very recent climate great again. According to the U.S. Natural Hazard statistics, last year also witnessed a below 30-year average in deaths caused not only by tornadoes, but also from hurricanes, flooding and summer overheating.

On the other hand, don’t count on the president getting cut any cool-headed climate slack either way. Staunch critics will probably still complain that the U.S. experienced a rise in deaths due to extra cold and long winter weather.

SOURCE




Climate security confusion abounds

The news media has been reporting what looks like a conflict within the Trump Administration, over the national security implications of climate change. Supposedly the conflict is between military and intelligence reports describing serious security implications and the Administrations position that climate change is not a serious threat.

There may in fact be no conflict. Here is how I see it. Hypothetical security vulnerability is the big confusion!

The military has a practice called “vulnerability analysis” in which a facility, region or system is assessed via a hypothetical thought experiment. The hypothesis can be extreme and often is. I have done a few that were completely unrealistic, but these analyses can still be useful.

These climate alarmist military and intelligence reports are just this sort of vulnerability analysis. They are all of this logical form:

“Suppose an extreme case of climate change happens, what adverse security effects might it cause?”

Approached in this way it is no surprise that many facilities, regions and systems are classified as vulnerable to some form of hypothetical extreme climate change or other (there being so many).

There are certainly regions that would be hard hit by extreme droughts, naval bases unprepared for fantastic sea level rise, airfields that would be damaged by catastrophic floods, etc. in the endless list of hypothetical extreme climate change impacts it might be hard to find one that had no security implications.

The point is that these hypothetical vulnerability analyses are in no sense realistic threat assessments. Not if these myriad extreme climate changes are not going to occur, and there is no reason to think that they will.

This is the Trump Administration’s position. Actionable national security threat assessments are based on what is actually happening or very likely to happen. They are never based on speculation, worst case scenarios, etc.

That these are not threat assessments calling for actual action needs to be made clear. As extreme hypothesis vulnerability analyses they might be okay.

The difference between a real threat assessment and a hypothetical vulnerability assessment is a huge confusion. (Confusion is my field.)

Note that we have pretty much the same deep confusion with the National Climate Assessment. The authors were specifically instructed to look at worst case scenarios, which are not a basis for action. Unfortunately these hypothetical scenarios were reported as real predictions, in part because some people actually believe them.

In the case of the IPCC’s October 2018 report that has generated the “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” scare, the confusion is different. The Paris Accord has targets that range from 2 degrees C of warming down to 1.5 degrees. The IPCC was tasked with saying what that difference looked like as far as the computer models were concerned.

Predictably the IPCC reported that there would be more damage with 2 degrees than with 1.5 degrees. But the differences were relatively small, certainly not catastrophic, which is why 2 degrees is still the target. They also said that hitting the 1.5 degree target would be very difficult.

In the “climate crisis” scare these small differences have morphed into 1.5 degrees of warming being the threshold to catastrophe. There is no basis for this whatever in the IPCC report, but the political stampede is on, led by the Green New Deal.

In short, climate change policy is a sea of confusion, especially with regard to national security.

SOURCE





Saving elk with coal mine reclamation

Contrary to what radical environmentalists would have you believe, rural property owners care deeply about the environment.

They’ve lived on their property oftentimes for generations. They see more wildlife in a year than many city dwellers may see in an entire lifetime.

Thus it’s sad to see when leftists, the vast majority urbanites, impugn their character as being callous toward the environment.

In episode 2 of CFACT’s “Conservation Nation” YouTube series, host Gabriella Hoffman interviews Leon Boyd and his volunteers who have been working to make reclaimed coal fields in Virginia suitable habitat for growing numbers of elk.

Private landowners have leased land to create habitat, while local volunteers and visitors from far and wide come to lend a helping hand with their efforts. Even the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals, and Energy has pitched in, allowing for these formerly-mined lands to be used for conservation purposes.

The program has been so successful that from 2014 to 2019, the elk herd has actually grown from 71 elk to now around 200. A stunning free-market success story, thanks to Leon’s and his volunteers’ work with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

In the video, Leon Boyd explains how the region has been working hard to recover from Obama’s disastrous “war on coal” – an ill-conceived political effort that hammered many hard working folks.

Notes Leon, “Southwest Virginia has thrived on coal for so many years and depended on coal, and with the last few years with the coal and the gas industry being on a downturn and a lot of jobs lost from our area and people leaving, by having the elk and the deer in places that we’re trying to put together, we see a lot folks travel here now to spend the weekend and either ride the trails or birdwatch or just wildlife enthusiasts out here seeing whatever may be on the properties.”

The mantra of the green agenda for America’s forests and wilderness is “don’t touch!” But history tells us that environmental solutions are best fostered when humans are empowered with market incentives and strong protections of their property rights — not when they are prohibited from having any interaction with the natural world whatsoever.

SOURCE





Skeptical Australian Radio commentator slammed over climate change remarks on TV science panel

That weed Karoly has been a Warmist from wayback.  He is far from an unbiased scientist.  Note that all he points to is raised levels of CO2.  But nobody disputes that.  What about the global temperature? Is that rising? Crickets. (It's falling). Typical Greenie deviousness

His argument that Australia is contributing more than its "fair share" of global warming is also  faulty.  What he is referring to is again CO2 emissions. And skeptics see CO2 as being primarily plant food  -- which it undoubtedly is -- and not as any significant influence on global temperature.  There have been long periods when CO2 has shot up while temperatuers remained stable -- the 30 relatively recent years of 1945 to 1975, for instance. Karoly has his head in an unmentionable place


Alan Jones copped an absolute roasting on tonight’s episode of Q&A — despite not even being on the panel.

The radio shock jock was slammed by a panel of science experts for downplaying human impact on climate change, after he said we only contribute three per cent to greenhouse gas emissions during his own Q&A appearance last month.

“I saw the radio commentator Alan Jones on TV recently, and he said that 0.04 per cent of the world’s atmosphere is CO2,” the questioner said. “‘Three per cent of that human beings create around the world, and of that, 1.3 per cent is created by Australians’. Is that correct, and if so, is human activity really making a difference?”

Professor David Karoly, an Australian atmospheric scientist based at CSIRO, bluntly responded: “Not everything Jones says is factually accurate.”

Prof Karoly said that, while it’s correct that 0.04 per cent of the world’s atmosphere is carbon dioxide, Jones’ statistics around humans causing climate change — and the role Australians specifically play — is completely false.

“I am a climate scientist, and Alan Jones is wrong. The reason he’s wrong is because we know that yes, the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere is 400 parts per million … and that corresponds to about 0.04 per cent.

“All his other numbers were wrong. We know that carbon dioxide concentration 100 years ago was about 280 parts per million, or 0.028 per cent, but it’s grown 120 parts per million — or about 40 per cent — and that 40 per cent increase is due to human activity. We know that for absolute certain.” [Real scientists never know anything for absolute certain]

In other words, Prof Karoly was saying we’ve technically increased greenhouse gases by 40 per cent, not the three per cent figure Jones used.

The scientist also slammed the radio host for implying that Australians contribute a negligible amount to global warming.

“Australians have contributed about 1.5 per cent. Now that sounds like a small amount, but Australia only makes up 0.3 per cent of the population, and we’re contributing 1.5 per cent roughly of greenhouse gases,” said Prof Karoly. “So is it fair that 0.3 per cent of the global population has contributed 1.5 per cent? We’ve contributed much more than our fair share.”

Particle physicist Brian Cox said people think the climate is overly “simple”, which is a big part of the problem. “But actually, the climate is extremely complicated. These models are very, very complicated and constantly evolving.

“I think many people assume you can just work out what the climate’s going to do, like it’s common sense. But it’s actually a very complex system.” [Too complex to support any firm prediction, in fact]

SOURCE 

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************