Cardinal blasts U.S. climate skeptics

Another South American Red priest

The pope’s closest adviser on Tuesday slammed climate-change skeptics, blaming capitalist motivations from “movements in the United States” for opposing the Catholic Church leader’s upcoming environmental letter.

“The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits,” said Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga at a news conference in Rome marking the start of Caritas Internationalis, an annual meeting of Catholic charitable groups, according to The Boston Globe.

Pope Francis is expected to issue his encyclical letter on the environment this year, and Rodríguez said many within and outside of the Catholic Church are looking forward to it “with hope.” The letter also comes ahead of the United Nations’ meeting on climate change in Paris this December.

“I have already heard criticism of the encyclical,” the Honduran cardinal said, calling it “absurd” for skeptics to reject a document that has not even yet been published. The letter is expected to be released in early summer, according to reports.

The Vatican co-hosted an environmental summit with the U.N. last month, during which the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative think-tank, held another event in Rome featuring speakers challenging climate-change science.

“Though Pope Francis’s heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” said Joseph Bast, Heartland’s president, in a statement to The Guardian.

SOURCE





Fools who want to play God

John P. Holdren, Obama's chief science adviser, once predicted dismal consequences for the human race unless we curtail population growth and redistribute wealth.

In 1995, Holdren joined with Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily of the Center for Conservation Studies at Stanford to author the opening chapter in a book — "Defining and Measuring Sustainability" — that was "Distributed for the United Nations University by the World Bank."

"We know for certain, for example that: No form of material growth (including population growth) other than asymptotic growth, is sustainable," wrote Holdren and his co-authors.

"At the sustainability limit, there will be a trade-off between population and energy-matter throughput per person, hence, ultimately, between economic activity per person and well-being per person," they said.

"This is enough to say quite a lot," they concluded, "about what needs to be faced up to eventually (a world of zero net physical growth), what should be done now (change unsustainable practices, reduce excessive material growth), and what the penalty will be for postponing attention to population limitation (lower well-being per person)."

In Human Ecology, a 1973 book he co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Obama's future science adviser put his prescriptions in less clinical terms.

"Political pressure must be applied immediately to induce the United States government to assume its responsibility to halt the growth of the American population," Holdren and his co-authors said then.

"A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States," they wrote. "De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with realities of ecology and the global resource situation."

"Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being," wrote Holdren and his co-authors.

"The situation," they wrote, "is best summarized in the statement: "Whatever your cause, it's a lost cause without population control."

But what if your cause were aiding in the achievement of eternal salvation for each of the net additional human lives God brought into being 20 minutes — or 20 years or 2,000 years — after Holdren and his co-authors wrote these words?

Would it have been better, as Obama's future science adviser argued, to halt such net additional human beings from coming into existence in the first place?

Did God truly fail to provide sufficient material resources for the human beings He created and to whom He gave sovereignty over the material world?

The answer to the second question is found in the stars above: We cannot count them all yet, let alone survey them, so we have no idea how vast are the material resources our Creator has put within our potential reach.

The answer to the former question is found by looking back across the extraordinary and sometimes unanticipated improvements in the material well-being of the human race that have occurred just since Obama's science adviser called for inducing "the United States government to assume its responsibility to halt the growth of the American population."

Which one of the inventors of our modern age should the government have halted from coming into being? Could government have picked out the next Einstein — and let him live — even if he was to be the 10th child born to a relatively poor family in a relatively crowded city?

Which life would the government deem less worthy than another?

The real threat to the human race is not in adding numbers to our population but in letting a few people in government play God.

SOURCE




An open letter to Dr. Ben Carson—and all presidential candidates—on energy policies

By Marita Noon

Congratulations on your decision to run for President of the United States. I was at home writing at the time of your announcement. As a professional speaker and someone who has spent more than thirty years training speakers, I felt your presentation was stellar — especially considering that you delivered it without a note. I even posted the following on my Facebook page: “I have work to do but am captivated listening to Ben Carson” — which garnered many “likes” and favorable comments.

I say that to emphasize that I like you. I am glad that you’ve joined the voices that will be utilizing the platforms afforded to them as candidates to educate the public as they expound on important issues facing America today. In fact, the libertarian leaning Reason Magazine applauded you for this exact reason: “To my happy surprise, he spent a good chunk of his announcement speech hinting at a Ross Perot-style crusade against the massive national debt and its drag on the economic growth.” Matt Welch, Reason’s editor in chief continues, “I would be happy if he made such talk the centerpiece of his campaign, particularly at a time when the new GOP congressional majority is already going wobbly on spending. If the guy’s gonna be sucking up oxygen in the race, he might as well be focusing monomaniacally on the giant sucking sound of debt service.”

I know you are not a politician and agree that is an asset for your candidacy. You speak, refreshingly, off the cuff and from the heart, rather than from a poll-tested script. As such, you’ll likely say a thing or two — especially in the early days of your campaign — for you which you’ll later have to apologize (at worst) or dial back on (at best).

I hope such is the case with your energy-themed comments during your first speech in Iowa since your declaration as a candidate, where you quoted President Obama’s deceptive “$4 billion a year in oil subsidies” line. It is disappointing to hear you parroting the president, but especially since it is essentially wrong.

When you use the term “subsidy,” the public automatically thinks a handout of government cash. President Obama chose to use it specifically to give his audience in New Hampshire a negative attitude toward “the oil industry.” Yet, as Forbes columnist Larry Bell found in his analysis of Obama’s attack on “fossil fuel subsidies,” the so-called subsidies are far from cash handouts and some of it doesn’t even go to the industry. I’ll explain.

Bell points out a broad definition for “subsidy” as used by Oil Change International: “any government action that lowers the cost of fossil fuel energy production, raises the price received by energy producers, or lowers the price paid by consumers.” Though different from public perception, this allows tax deductions — akin to those used by most industries — to be relabeled.

Three such tax deductions presently allowed by the IRS are: (The Heritage Foundation offers an excellent primer.)

Oil depletion allowance: Applied to small, independent producers (large integrated corporations haven’t been eligible for this since the mid-1970s), this deduction allows producers to pass depletion deductions (similar to benefits available to all mineral extraction, timber, etc.) on to individual investors.

Expensing drilling costs: Producers can write off expenses in the year occurred rather than capitalizing them and taking the deductions over several years.

Credit for taxes to foreign nations: Provides an offset for international companies that paid foreign taxes so that the companies are not taxed twice on the same income.

While oil-and-gas producers are allowed typical cost-of-doing-business tax deductions, they are singled out to receive fewer tax breaks than other industries. For example, Bell highlights Section 199 of the “American Job Creation Act of 2004” — which was intended “to provide a competitive advantage to domestic companies engaged in product manufacturing, sales, leasing or licensing, and production-related software activities.” Most businesses engaged in “qualified production activities” receive a 9 percent deduction from net income. Yet oil and gas can claim only 6 percent.

Using the broad definition of “subsidies,” there are some large dollar figures that warrant review. A summary of the data from a 2010 OECD-IEA report titled “Fossil Fuel Subsidies and Other Support,” concludes a total of $4.5 billion for oil-related subsidies in the U.S. in 2010 — which may be where the $4 billion talking point comes from. But that, too, is deceptive.

Energy analyst Robert Rapier broke down the data and found, as reported in Forbes:

“The single largest expenditure is just over $1 billion for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is designed to protect the U.S. from oil shortages. The second largest category is just under $1 billion in tax exemptions for farm fuel. The justification for that tax exemption is that fuel taxes pay for roads, and the farm equipment that benefits from the tax exemption is technically not supposed to be using the roads. The third largest category? $570 million for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. (This program is classified as a petroleum subsidy because it artificially reduces the price of fuel, which helps oil companies sell more of it). Those three programs account for $2.5 billion a year in ‘oil subsidies.’”

As you can see, understanding the whole fossil-fuel subsidy argument is complicated, but it is clearly not the cash give-away the anti-petroleum crowd wants people to believe. And I haven’t addressed all the tax and royalty revenue that comes in from the oil-and-gas industry.

I know you were in Iowa, and you must have felt that you needed to offer some nod to corn-based ethanol, but your suggestion that oil subsidies should, instead, be used to build ethanol-fueling stations, indicates that you are ill-informed on renewable energy as well.

We could take apart your comment about ethanol being 50-80 cents a gallon less than gasoline and being better for the environment — there is plenty to work with there. But for brevity, I am going to stick with the subsidy theme and expand it to include renewables.

Because energy subsidies are complicated, I think the easiest way to look at them is using an energy-received-for-dollar-spent model — which is a good indicator of how federal dollars are being used and the value the nation is getting from them.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA), at the request of Congress, recently updated a study it did in 2010 that evaluated the amount of subsidies the federal government provided energy producers for fiscal year 2013. In short, it found, as reported by the Institute for Energy Research (IER): “The largest increases in federal energy subsidies were in electricity-related renewable energy, which increased 54 percent over the 3-year period, from $8.6 billion to $13.2 billion. Total fossil fuel subsidies declined by 15 percent, from $4.0 billion to $3.4 billion.”

IER took the numbers from the EIA study and calculated the federal subsidies and support per unit of electricity produced. It concluded that “on a per dollar basis, government policies have led to solar generation being subsidized by over 345 times more than coal and oil and natural gas electricity production, and wind is being subsidized over 52 times more than the more conventional fossil fuels on a unit of production basis.”

The Independent Petroleum Association of America did a similar analysis based on the EIA’s 2008 numbers. At the time, it found that “on this basis, the highest figure by far is for ethanol and biofuels, at $5.72 per million BTU for 2007, with oil and gas coming in at just 3 cents per million BTU.”

Dr. Carson, while supporting renewable energy, like ethanol, may seem in vogue, because you are running for the highest office in the land, I encourage you — and all presidential candidates — to learn from the recent elections in the UK.

Consider this: Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey became the first cabinet minister to lose a seat in almost twenty years. Davey, according to the UK’s Mirror, “claimed credit for leading the bid to secure a ‘massive increase’ in renewable electricity in the UK and …he led negotiations for the UK on the world stage at UN climate talks in Qatar, Poland and Peru.” By comparison, Prime Minister David Cameron, who while campaigning in Montgomeryshire, promised if he was re-elected, “We’ll scrap funds for wind farms.” Regarding the unpopular project, Cameron said, “I will seek a further careful consideration of this wind farms/power lines project. It’s financial and environmental madness. It should be abandoned.” Though not predicted, Cameron won “the sweetest victory,” while “Labour was virtually wiped out in Scotland and the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed,” reported The Daily Telegraph.

Dr. Carson, I know you are smart, very smart, but you know medicine. You need very smart people to advise you on energy policy now, before you address the topic any further. I have a cadre of energy experts that I could make available to you — and any candidate who wants smart energy policy.

Call me, maybe?

SOURCE






Wind energy myths spun by lobbyists and salesmen

Industrial wind is a net loser: economically, environmentally, technologically and civilly

Mary Kay Barton

A recent letter in my local paper by American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) representative Tom Vinson is typical of wind industry sales propaganda. It deserves correction.

This is the reality:  Industrial wind energy is NET LOSER – economically, environmentally, technically and civilly. Let’s examine how.

Economically. New York State (NYS) has some of the highest electricity rates in the United States – a whopping 53% above the national average. This is due in large part to throwing hundreds of billions of our taxpayer and ratepayer dollars into the wind. High electricity costs drive people and businesses out of the state, and ultimately hurt poor families the most.

A NYS resident using 6,500 kWh of electricity annually will pay about $400 per year more for their electricity than if our electricity prices were at the national average. That’s over $3.2 BILLION dollars annually that will not be spent in the rest of the state economy.

Why destroy entire towns, when just one single 450-MW gas-fired combined-cycle generating unit located near New York City (NYC) – where the power is needed – operating at only 60% of its capacity, would provide more electricity than all of NYS’s wind factories combined.

Furthermore, that one 450 MW gas-fired unit would only require about one-fourth of the capital costs – and would not bring all the negative civil, economic, environmental, human health and property value impacts that are caused by the sprawling industrial wind factories. Nor would it require all the additional transmission lines to NYC.

The Institute for Energy Research tallied the numbers and found that each wind job costs $11.45 million and costs more than four jobs that are lost elsewhere in the economy, because of all the subsidies and the resulting “skyrocketing” cost of electricity. In fact, on a unit of production basis, wind is subsidized over 52 times more than conventional fossil fuels.

In the United Kingdom, David Cameron has finally awakened to the folly of wasting billions on the failed technology of wind. He recently declared, “We will scrap funds for wind farms.”

Environmentally. According to the AWEA, the USA has some 45,100 Industrial Wind Turbines (IWTs). Remotely sited IWTs are located far from urban centers where the power is needed. This requires a spider web of new transmission lines (at ratepayers’ expense), which exponentially adds to the needless bird and bat deaths caused by IWTs themselves.

Additionally, sprawling industrial wind factories cause massive habitat fragmentation, which is cited as one of the main reasons for species decline worldwide.

Studies show MILLIONS of birds and bats are being slaughtered annually by these giant “Cuisinarts of the sky,” as a Sierra official dubbed IWTs in a rare moment of candor.

Governor Cuomo’s environmental hypocrisy is also worth noting. Cuomo is supporting “dimming the lights” in New York City to help stop migrating birds from becoming disoriented and crashing into buildings. Yet simultaneously, Cuomo is pushing for many more giant bird-chopping wind turbines – with 600-foot-high blinking red lights, along the shores of Lake Ontario (a major migratory bird flyway), and across rural New York State.

Technically. Because wind provides NO capacity value, or firm capacity (specified amounts of power on demand), wind requires constant “shadow capacity” from our reliable, dispatchable baseload generators to cover for wind’s inherent volatile, skittering flux on the grid.  Therefore, wind cannot replace those conventional generation sources.  Instead, wind locks us into dependence on fossil fuels – and represents a redundancy (two duplicate sources of electricity), which Big Wind CEO Patrick Jenevein admitted “turns ratepayers and taxpayers into double-payers for the same product.”

The list of accidents, blade failures (throwing debris over a half mile), fires (ten times more than the wind industry previously admitted) and other problems is updated quarterly at a website in the UK. This lengthy and growing list is evidence of why giant, moving machines do NOT belong anywhere near where people live.

Even the AWEA admits that the life of a typical wind turbine is only 10 to13 years (January 2006: North American Wind Power). This is substantiated by studies on these short-lived lemons.

Adding insult to injury, the actual output of all of New York State’s wind factories combined has been averaging a pathetic 23 percent.  If IWTs were cars, they would have been correctly dubbed ‘lemons’ and relegated to the junkyard a long time ago.

Civilly. The only thing that has ever been reliably generated by industrial wind is complete and utter civil discord. Neighbor is pitted against neighbor, and even family member against family member. Sprawling industrial wind factories have totally divided communities, which is already apparent in towns across NYS and the country.  It is the job of good government to foresee and prevent this kind of civil discord – not to promote it.

Regarding human health, NYS officials admitted at a 2009 NYSERDA meeting on wind that they knew “infrasound” from wind turbines was a problem worldwide. The growing list of problems globally highlights that these problems are only getting worse.

At the NYSERDA meeting, a former noise control engineer for the New York State Public Service Commission, Dr. Dan Driscoll, testified that ‘infrasound’ (sounds below 20 Hz) are sounds you can’t hear, but the body can feel.

Dr. Driscoll said that ‘infrasound’ is NOT blocked by walls, and it can very negatively affect the human body – especially after prolonged, continuous exposure.  He said symptoms include headache, nausea, sleeplessness, dizziness, ringing in the ears and other maladies.

NYS Department of Health official Dr. Jan Storm testified that, despite knowing the global nature of the “infrasound” problem, NYS still had not done any health studies (despite having federal money available to do so). Here we are six years later, and indefensibly, NYS officials still have not called for any independent studies to assure the protection of New York State citizens.

“The Golden Rule,” as espoused by Rotary International’s excellent ‘Four-Way Test’ of the things we think, say and do, should be the moral and ethical standard our public servants aspire to uphold.  The test asks:

1.      Is it the truth?

2.      Is it fair to all concerned?

3.      Will it build goodwill and better friendships?

4.      Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

When applied to the industrial wind issue, the answers are a resounding, “NO!”

Via email





NC House votes to freeze renewables standards and scale back corporate welfare subisidies

Everybody that pays a light bill got a break from the Republican led NC House today (5-6-15), assuming the Senate and Governor go along. The House passed HB 760, effectively freezing the state's renewable energy standards and scaled back corporate welfare to select businesses who had to have subsidies to make solar energy work, for themselves. Rep. Mike Hager, one of the key leaders in the issue said: "The winners in this issue are the consumers of North Carolina. What folks (power porducers) need to do int his state is learn to compete."

Americans For Prosperity issued the following statement after the House action:

State Director Donald Bryson of Americans for Prosperity North Carolina released a statement praising the passage of H.B. 760 Regulatory Reform Act of 2015 on its final reading in the N.C. House of Representatives:

"Today's pro-consumer vote by the N.C. House put a dent in state government's culture of corporate favoritism. Lawmakers put their constituents' 'kitchen table' concerns first by stopping a monthly energy fee on residential customers from tripling under the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS)."

"This compromise measure provides relief to families who pay their utility bills and work hard to grow the economy without taxpayer support or government favors. We're excited that House lawmakers removed a burden on family budgets rather than pad the pockets of another special interest in Raleigh."

"Removing state government's stranglehold on North Carolina's energy supply lets our private sector create real jobs in a fair, free market that is based on supply, demand and affordability. Bureaucratic control of our economy's engine failed to deliver a net jobs or environmental benefit to the state, but it did slow commercial growth, reduce wages and kill tens of thousands of jobs."

"Finally, this compromise initiates a critical legislative study of the RPS' impact on consumers, to provide state lawmakers a comprehensive understanding of the energy mandate that helps chart a path toward prosperity. We look forward to working with the N.C. Senate on an energy policy that puts people first, fosters innovation and focuses on competitive, cost-effective sources of power."

John Droz, who as a citizen activist is in large measure responsible for this victory, issued the following statement:
Thanks to your support, we have a major NC SUCCESS to report.

The original authors might have been well-intentioned, but Senate Bill 3 (2007) has resulted in eight years of harmful consequences to NC citizens, businesses, military and its environment. Yes, a few people also benefited, but the NET consequences appear to be negative.

Yesterday, despite ferocious opposition by those with their hand in the public trough, the NC House passed a bill (H760) that goes a long way towards stopping some harms caused by SB-3.

More HERE





Is Australia's Great Barrier Reef  'In Danger'?

If I have the time I do sometimes read Australia's far-Left "New Matilda".  I would like to start a blog that regularly demolished their articles -- perhaps to be called "Walzing New Matilda" -- but I have weightier matters to spend my time on. Anyway, the article below is up to its usual standard of presenting only half of the story.  Balance is the Devil incarnate to Leftists.  

Some scientists do say that the GBR has shrunk by 50% but the interesting question is why there has been any shrinkage at all.  The Warmist below knows why, of course.  It's because of global warming.  Pesky that there has been no global warming for 18 years though.  Can something that does not exist cause anything?  They also seem to think that Richard Branson is a climate scientist.  Enough said on that.

The key point, however, is that the reef does get heavily impacted by natural events such as the many cyclones that have hit North Queensland in recent years.  Cyclones are very destructive of coral.  HOWEVER, when we look at that storm destruction, we also  find that corals grow back rapidly.  While that happens, the GBR is in no "danger". Any changes are temporary. See here and here, for instance.

Warmists will say that the cyclones were caused by global warming but again I ask: Can something that does not exist cause anything?  

Billionaire Richard Branson has urged the United Nations to list the World Heritage value of the Great Barrier Reef as ‘in danger’ after being approached by advocacy group 1Million Women.

While admitting the campaign may seem “counter intuitive”, Branson argues it is an effective way to “stop further irreversible damage” to the reef “and to protect it for generations to come”.

“Saying the Great Barrier Reef is ‘in danger’ could be just what it needs,” Branson wrote in a blog post yesterday.

The United Nations World Heritage Committee is set to make a decision on whether to change the listing of the reef at a meeting in Bonn, Germany, in June this year.

Like Branson, the UN has expressed concern that port developments and coal ships set to service Australia’s largest ever coal mine, which the federal government approved last year, will further damage the reef.

The Great Barrier Reef has already lost half of its coral cover in the last three decades, and it faces further threats from the Crown of Thorns Starfish and increased agriculture run-off.

In 2013, a federal government report noted that 24 out of 41 attributes which make up the ‘Outstanding Universal Value’ of the reef under the World Heritage Convention are deteriorating.

But the greatest threat to the reef, according to government scientists, is climate change.  “The reef’s plight, like many others, is unbearably sad,” Branson said. “It is being totally overwhelmed by climate change impacts through a destructive combination of heat-driven coral bleaching, ocean acidification and tropical storms.”

Despite climate change being the greatest threat to the reef, a recent Australian Government plan designed to guide conservation efforts for the next 35 years and address UN concerns made next to no mention of the risk to the reef from rising emissions.

On Thursday, the United Nations warned that for the first time in millions of years the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earths atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million.

The Greens environment spokesperson, Larissa Waters, said on Wednesday that she doesn’t “think the government has done enough policy-wise to avert the threat of a world heritage in danger listing for the Great Barrier Reef”.

“Which is an absolute tragedy,” she said, “because we’re talking about one of the seven wonders of the world.”

“The foremost World Heritage Committee has for the past four years now said to Australia ‘slow down, you’re on this path of industrialisation, we’re worried about the future of the reef, your own scientists are worried about the future of your reef, what are you going to do about it?”

“And the government has consistently thumbed its nose at the key recommendations, and it’s made some changes around the edges.”

Waters said she hopes the reef is not listed as ‘in danger’, despite the fact it is “in serious jeopardy”.

Yesterday, The World Wildlife Fund has released a ‘to do’ list, lobbying the government to do more than is proposed in its ‘Reef 2050’ plan.

At least one federal MP is likely to be unimpressed with these recent developments.

George Christensen MP, whose electorate of Dawson takes in part of the Great Barrier Reef, is standing by the government’s “exemplary document”.

The outspoken backbencher recently voiced his outrage at “eco-traitors” who are committing the “treason” of advocating for an ‘in danger’ listing.

“These extreme greens act like Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings, flying overseas and whispering in the ears of the decision-makers and diplomats who have anything to do with UNESCO and the World Heritage Committee, poisoning their minds on the state of the reef,” Christensen said.

“They belong to groups such as Greenpeace, the Australian Marine Conservation Society, Friends of the Earth, Get Up, and the Environmental Defenders Office.”

SOURCE

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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

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Greenies hitting those who can least afford it again

For a totally theoretical reason.  Asthma is a very draining ailment, including financially draining.  But the inexpensive inhalers that asthmatics used to use to relieve their symptoms have now vanished from the martket, leaving only expensive ones available. Why?  Because of a FDA ban designed to protect the ozone layer -- an old Greenie scare that has amounted to nothing, as is usual with Greenie scares.  The hole in the ozone layer waxes and wanes as it has always done, despite the ban on simple refrigerant chemicals



SOURCE





State of the Planet: Better Than Ever

Think about this: There is no time in the history of mankind that would be a better time to be alive than today.

Although most people resist this message, and perhaps it is natural to have a yearning for the simpler times of yesteryear, nearly every objective measure of the state of the planet and the state of human progress shows vast improvement over time. You can find proof of this in about 30 seconds on your iPhone, which has about as much computing power than every computer used by all the nations of World War II.

Why is there so much pessimism about the state of our planet? I recently watched the Earth Day speeches on the Washington Mall and they were drenched with Chicken Little tales of a coming apocalypse.

Here is the way CNN explained what we have to look forward to: “Think super droughts, rising seas, mass extinctions, and acidifying oceans.” Then it warned: “Disappearing coasts,” and “bye bye, animals.”

President Barack Obama sounded the alarm when he warned of climate change: “This is not a problem for another generation. Not anymore. This is a problem now. It has serious implications for the way we live right now. Stronger storms. Deeper droughts. Longer wildfire seasons.”

He claims it is already happening. It reminds me of those campy 1970s buttons: “Stop the planet, I want to get off.”

Forty five years ago when the first Earth Day was held, the catastrophe that awaited us was mass starvation, lost farmland, overpopulation, our supplies of oil and gas running on empty, early death, nuclear winter, and believe it or not, a coming second ice age.

Every single one of those predictions was not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. The opposite occurred. But the doomsday machine rolls on. The declinism on the state of our planet and the well-being of our species, permeates our schools, our churches, our malls, radio, TV, the Internet and our whole culture.

In sum, our planet is in a miserable state, we’re told over and over.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the single greatest misinformation campaign in world history. The state of our planet and the state of humanity has never been stronger. Nature has never been more bountiful.

I recently wrote of the following six statistics which go a long way to proving how well we are doing. The response from the greens was vitriol and even threats to my physical safety for writing these truths. But no one refuted the facts, because, well facts are facts.

Here they are:

1.) Natural resources are more abundant and affordable today than ever before in history. Short term volatility aside, the price of almost all natural resources — from cocoa to cotton to coal — is cheaper today in real terms than 50, 100, or 500 years ago. This has happened even as the world’s population has nearly tripled. Technology has far outpaced depletion of the earth’s resources.

2.) Energy resources are growing. Energy is the master resource; and it is super abundant. Remember when people like Paul Ehrlich nearly 50 years ago and Barack Obama just three years ago warned that we were running out of oil and gas? Today, in the new age of oil and gas thanks to fracking, the United States has hundreds of years of petroleum and an estimated 300 years of coal. We’re not running out of energy, we are running into it.

3.) Air and water is cleaner than ever. Since the late 1970s, pollutants in the air have plunged. Lead pollution plunged by more than 90 percent, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide by more than 50 percent, with ozone and nitrogen dioxide declining as well. By nearly every standard measure it is much, much, much cleaner today in the United States than 50 and 100 years ago. The air is so clean now that the EPA worries about carbon dioxide, which isn’t even a pollutant. (And, by the way, carbon emissions are falling too, thanks to fracking). One hundred years ago, about one in four deaths in America was due to contaminants in drinking water. But from 1971-2002, fewer than three people per year in the United States were documented to have died from water contamination.

4.) There is no Malthusian nightmare of overpopulation. Birth rates have fallen by about one-half around the world over the last 50 years. Developed countries are having fewer kids, not too many. Even with a population of 7.3 billion people, average incomes, especially in poor countries, have surged over the last 40 years. The number of people in abject poverty fell by 1 billion between 1981 and 2011, even as global population increased by more than 1.5 billion. That’s just short of a miracle.

5.) Global per capita food production is 40 percent higher today than as recently as 1950. In most nations the nutrition problem today is obesity — too many calories consumed — not hunger. The number of famines and related deaths over the last 100 years has fallen in half. More than 12 million lives on average were lost each decade from the 1920s-1960s to famine. Since then, fewer than 4 million lives on average per decade were lost. When famine does happen, it’s primarily a result of political corruption or malice, not nature growing too little food. Furthermore, the price of food has fallen steadily in the United States - and most other nations steadily for 200 years.

6.) The rate of death and physical destruction from natural disasters or severe weather changes has plummeted over the last century. Loss of life from hurricanes, floods, hurricanes, heat, droughts, and so on is at or near record lows. This is because we have much better advance warning systems, our infrastructure is much more durable, and we have things like air conditioning to adapt to weather changes. We are constantly discovering new ways to harness and even tame nature.

Again, these are just standard facts — though not very well known. But you could look them up. The point is that human advance and growth of the economy leads to a steadily improving and bountiful planet.

And the growth comes as a result of free enterprise. The environmentalists have declared free-market capitalism a near-treasonous pursuit. In reality, free markets with reasonable and sane regulation, will save the planet from extinction. Meanwhile, the socialists, the communists, the Sandinistas, the Stalinists, are the ones who did the greatest damage to the planet - with such avoidable catastrophes as the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

The environmentalists still believe that command and control rules and regulations — on how much water can be flushed from our toilets, what kind of light bulbs we can use, the temperature setting of our thermostats, the amount of solar and wind energy we must use, the type of energy efficiency we get from our household appliances, the amount of water we can use to water our lawns (as in California), even limits on how many kids we can have (as in China) — will save the planet.

They won’t. Freedom will.

This is very good news for those who believe that one of our primary missions as human beings is to make life better over time and to leave our planet better off for future generations. That’s just what we are doing.

SOURCE





The Death of the Green Energy Movement

The green energy movement in America is dead. May it rest in peace. No, a majority of American energy over the next 20 years is not going to come from windmills and solar panels. One important lesson to be learned from the green energy fad’s rapid and expensive demise is that central planning doesn’t work.

What crushed green energy was the boom in shale oil and gas along with the steep decline in the price of fossil fuel that few saw coming just a few years ago.

A new International Energy Agency report concedes that green energy is in fast retreat and is getting crushed by “the recent drop in fossil fuel prices.” It finds that the huge price advantage for oil and natural gas means “fossil plants still dominate recent (electric power) capacity additions.”

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Most of the government experts — and many private investors too — bought into the “peak oil” nonsense and the forecasts of fuel prices continuing to rise as we depleted the oil from the Earth’s crust. Oil was expected to stay way over $100 a barrel and potentially soon hit $200 a barrel. National Geographic infamously advertised on its cover in 2004 “The End of Cheap Oil.”

Barack Obama told voters that green energy was necessary because oil is a “finite resource” and we would eventually run out. Apparently, Obama never read “The Ultimate Resource” by Julian Simon which teaches us that human ingenuity in finding new resources outpaces resource depletion.

When fracking and horizontal drilling technologies burst onto the scene, U.S. oil and gas reserves nearly doubled almost overnight. Oil production from 2007-2014 grew by more than 70 percent and natural gas production by nearly 30 percent.



The shale revolution is a classic disruptive technology advance that has priced the green movement out of the competitive market. Natural gas isn’t $13, but is now close to $3, an 80 percent decline. Oil prices have fallen by nearly half.

Green energy can’t possibly compete with that. Marketing windpower in an environment of $3 natural gas is like trying to sell sand in the Sahara. Instead of letting the green energy fad die a merciful death, the Obama administration only lavished more subsidies on the Solyndras of the world.

Washington suffered from what F.A. Hayek called the “fatal conceit.” Like the 1950s central planners in the Politburo, Congress and the White House thought they knew where the future was headed. According to a 2015 report by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, over the past 5 years, the U.S. government spent $150 billion on “solar power and other renewable energy projects.” Even with fracking changing the energy world, these blindfolded sages stuck with their wild green-eyed fantasy that wind turbines were the future.

Meanwhile, the return of $2.50 a gallon gasoline at the pump is flattening the battery car market. A recent report from the trade publication Fusion notes: “electric vehicle purchases in the U.S. have stagnated.” According to auto analysts at Edmunds.com, “only 45 percent of this year’s hybrid and EV trade-ins have gone toward the purchase of another alternative fuel vehicle. That’s down from just over 60 percent in 2012.”

Edmunds.com says that “never before have loyalty rates for alt-fuel vehicles fallen below 50 percent” and it speculated that “many hybrid and EV owners are driven more by financial motives rather than a responsibility to the environment.” That’s what happens when the world is awash in cheap fossil fuels.

This isn’t the first time American taxpayers have been fleeced by false green energy dreams. In the late 1970s the Carter administration spent billions of dollars on the Synthetic Fuels Corporation which was going to produce fuel economically and competitively. Solar and wind power were also brief flashes in the pan. It all crash landed by 1983 when oil prices crashed to as low as $20 a barrel after Reagan deregulated energy. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation was one of the great corporate welfare boondoggles in American history.

A lesson should have been learned there — but Washington went all in again under Presidents Bush and Obama.

At least private sector investors have lost their own money in these foolish bets on bringing back energy sources from the Middle Ages — like wind turbines. The tragedy of government as venture capitalist is that the politicians lose our money. These government-backed technologies divert private capital away from potentially more promising innovations.

Harold Hamm, president of Continental Resources, and one of the discoverers of the Bakken Shale in North Dakota tells the story of meeting with Barack Obama at the White House in 2010 to tell him of the fracking revolution. Obama arrogantly responded that electric cars would soon replace fossil fuels. Was he ever wrong.

We don’t know if renewables will ever play a significant role in America’s energy mix. But if it does ever happen, it will be a result of market forces, not central planning.

SOURCE






CO2 Hits 'Milestone.' So What?



The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this week that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere set a new record high. Angela Fritz of The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang reports, “For the first time since we began to track the greenhouse gas in our planet’s atmosphere, carbon dioxide surpassed 400 parts per million in March — a concentration that scientists consider a significant milestone for Earth’s climate and our ability to reverse the trend.” Climate Central’s Brian Kahn says that “CO2 emissions are the main driver of climate change and have risen more than 120 ppm since pre-industrial times.” He adds, “The planet has warmed 1.6°F over that period as well.”

But that claim has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. NOAA says 2014 was the hottest year yet, and this year is on pace to be even warmer. However, satellites — a superior method utilized for temperature recordings — reveal absolutely no global warming in nearly 18 and a half years. So even though CO2 is rising, temperature are not, despite assertions to the contrary. Moreover, as climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer reminds us, it’s been nearly “3,500 days since the last time a major hurricane (Cat 3 or stronger) struck the U.S., which was Hurricane Wilma in 2005.” Why aren’t we celebrating that record? He also notes, “Most people aren’t aware that the atmospheric concentration would have gone up twice as fast if not for the fact that nature loves the stuff. No matter how fast we produce it with our cars and planes and power plants, nature sucks up half of it, like a starving dog that has just been fed dinner. In fact, without CO2 life as we know it on Earth would not exist.” By burning fossil fuels, you could say we’re doing our part to green the planet.

SOURCE





Parental environment mediates impacts of increased carbon dioxide on a coral reef fish

Fish adapt rapidly to climate change  -- within one generation

Gabrielle M. Miller et al.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the surface ocean are increasing owing to rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere1. Higher CO2 levels are predicted to affect essential physiological processes of many aquatic organisms2, 3, leading to widespread impacts on marine diversity and ecosystem function, especially when combined with the effects of global warming4, 5, 6. Yet the ability for marine species to adjust to increasing CO2 levels over many generations is an unresolved issue. Here we show that ocean conditions projected for the end of the century (approximately 1,000 μatm CO2 and a temperature rise of 1.5–3.0 °C) cause an increase in metabolic rate and decreases in length, weight, condition and survival of juvenile fish. However, these effects are absent or reversed when parents also experience high CO2 concentrations. Our results show that non-genetic parental effects can dramatically alter the response of marine organisms to increasing CO2 and demonstrate that some species have more capacity to acclimate to ocean acidification than previously thought.

Nature Climate Change 2, 858–861 (2012) doi:10.1038/nclimate1599




Some basic climate background from successful forecaster Bill Gray

I am appalled that scientific objectivity has been so blatantly disregarded by our government and the world’s environmentalists who would use erroneous climate model results to justify their faulty AGW pronouncement which are injurious to humanity.

Gray’s View on AGW.  We AGW skeptics need to be able to offer two basic plausible physical explanations in order to negate the AGW hypothesis.

1.    Why projected CO2 increases over the next 50-100 years will only be able to bring about very small amounts (0.2-0.4°C) of global mean temperature rise.

2.    Why there is natural climate change unrelated to CO2 variations?  We need a believable physical explanation for the global climate changes over the last few thousand years (Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, etc.) and in particular the apparent quite modest global warming of the last century.  We also need an explanation of the shorter time-scale multi-decadal global warming periods (1910-1940, 1975-1999) and of the global cooling or neutral periods (1880-1910, 1940-1974, and 1999-2015).

Explanation #1 can be understood as a result of CO2 increases causing more global precipitation and associated increase in the globe’s deep cumulonimbus (Cb) convective clouds.  These CO2 induced precipitation increases bring about upper tropospheric drying which allows more infrared (IR) flux to space – a negative water-vapor feedback.  This extra rainfall enhances surface evaporation cooling which acts to balance out most of the expected global warming resulting from CO2’s increasing blockage of IR to space (3.7 Wm-2 for a CO2 doubling).  This prevents CO2 increases from bringing about any significant global warming.  Only minimal warming (0.2-0.4°C) is going to occur with a doubling of CO2.  The main effect of CO2 increases will be an enhancement of global average precipitation of about 3 percent.  This enhanced global rainfall will occur in regions where it is already raining and should be hardly noticed.

Explanation #2 can be explained by the multi-decadal and multi-century variations in the globe’s deep ocean circulations (or Meridional Overturning Circulation – MOC) which are primarily driven by space and time variations of oceanic salinity.  Salinity changes occur in ocean areas where there are long period differences in surface evaporation minus precipitation.  This is especially the situation of the Atlantic where ocean evaporation is 10-20 percent greater than precipitation.  Salinity driven ocean changes bring about alterations in the strength of the Atlantic Ocean Thermohaline Circulation (THC), and through Pacific basin upwelling response variations to variation in the Pacific multi-decadal oscillation (PDO) as well.  There is also salinity driven ocean subsidence around the Antarctic continent.  All these factors influence the strength of the MOC.

Most of the globe’s last century weak global warming has, in my view, been a consequence of a modest slowdown of the global oceans MOC.  This last century long MOC slowdown is also detected in an associated weak increase (in milliseconds) in the earth’s rate of rotation.

Lack of Ability of Other Suggested Non-ocean Climate Change Mechanisms to Rival or be Superior to Coming CO2 Influences.  The many other non-ocean proposed physical ideas for climate change (where orbital parameters do not play a role) such as

1.    Solar variability

2.    Sun-spot changes

3.    Cosmic ray variability

4.    Aerosol changes

5.    Human land use changes

6.    Volcanic activity

may each play a minor role in some aspects of the globe’s climate alteration.  But the individual physical influence of each of these suggested mechanisms is too small to be used as a dominant physical argument against the CO2 change hypothesis.

None of the above proposed climate change mechanisms well match the observed past changes in global temperature.  In addition, the magnitude of potential energy change from these above non-ocean physical mechanisms does not have the power to come close to producing the climate changes which the variations of the deep ocean circulations are capable of bringing about.

We AGW skeptics who have proposed non-ocean climate change mechanisms as an alternate to CO2 induced climate changes will continue to have difficulty in rebutting the CO2 advocates.  These alternate physical hypothesizes do not have enough supporting observational evidence to allow any one of them or a combination of them to be judged to be more dominant than the changes which future CO2 increases will be able to bring about.

We critics of the AGW CO2 warming hypothesis need a more dominant alternate physical hypothesis which is stronger and which better conforms in time with the global observations.  Changes in the ocean’s deep circulation currents appears to be, by far, the best physical explanation for the observed global surface temperature changes (see Gray 2009, 2011, 2012, 2012).  It seems ridiculous to me for both the AGW advocates and us skeptics to so closely monitor current weather and short-time climate change as indication of CO2’s influence on our climate.  This assumes that the much more dominant natural climate changes that have always occurred are no longer in operation or have relevance.

Cumulus Convection Influences.  Most cumulus convection is organized in meso-scale cloud clusters containing 10 to 20 individual Cb convective elements which are typically concentrated in areas of 200-500 km wide.  The individual deep Cb convective cells within these cloud-cluster systems are often arranged in lines and new convective elements are continuously being formed and dissipated.  Each new Cb convective element goes through a typical lifecycles of an hour or so.  The strong downdrafts from the late stages of these dying Cb elements typically contribute to the low-level mass forcing needed for the initiating of other new adjacent Cb clouds.  This is why multiple Cb clouds tend to cluster together.

Cb clouds penetrate well into the middle and upper troposphere.  The excess mass within the weakening upper-level Cb elements diverge and spread out as cirrus clouds.  This higher level extra mass and cirrus cloudiness then begins to undergo sinking so as to make space and satisfy mass balance for the new emerging upper tropospheric Cb penetrating elements.

Subsidence Drying.  Cumulonimbus updraft elements have very high rainfall efficiency as they weaken and die in the very cold upper troposphere.  The very cold air at these upper tropospheric levels can hold (even at saturation) very little water-vapor (only about 1% of the low-level moisture content by mass and 0.1 of 1% by volume) compared to the middle and lower tropospheric moisture contents.  This very low water-vapor content air from the upper Cb outflow then sinks, evaporates its cloud particles, and arrives at lower levels where the saturated water-vapor contents are much higher.  The original upper-level dry air then mixes with the lower level air.  This mixture of air at the lower level becomes drier than the air at this level was before any of the upper-level air mixed into it.

A saturated air parcel from a dying Cb cloud which sinks from the 200 mb (12 km height) level to the lower pressure height of 300 mb (10 km ht.) will arrive at this lower-level with a RH of only 10-12 percent of the lower level air.  These unusually large upper-level subsidence drying amounts are a consequence of the very large gradient of saturated vapor pressure in the upper troposphere.  Vertical gradients of saturated vapor pressure at middle and lower tropospheric levels are, percentage wise, much smaller.

An increase in global deep convective (Cb) activity as a result of CO2 increases will thus bring drying (not moistening) to the upper troposphere, just the opposite of the climate models projections.  This upper tropospheric drying acts to lower the infrared (IR) radiation emission level (EL) to a lower height and a warmer temperature where larger amounts of IR energy (σT4) are able to be fluxed to space.  Increases in net global Cb convective activity results in higher amounts of IR energy being fluxed to space, not lower amounts as all the climate modelers and their fellow AGW advocates believe.

Our extensive analysis of the ISCCP data well shows the degree to which the broad upper-level sinking air from the global rain areas have had their RH reduced when an enhancement of the global rainfall rate (and accompanied increase in Cb convection) occurs.  Please see the attached short write-up “Crux of AGWs Flawed Science” for more detailed discussion and clarifying figures and tables.

How Global Temperature Will Change as CO2 Increases.  The rise of CO2 gas occurs very slowly.  By contrast, the troposphere’s hydrologic cycle and its energy dissipation cycle operate on a time-scale of only around 10 days.  Any CO2 radiational induced warming will be quickly felt by the earth’s surface and will immediately act to enhance surface evaporation.  The more surface evaporation, the less the surface will warm.

A doubling of CO2 gas in the atmosphere will cause an alteration of our global climate but not in the same way as envisioned by the climate modelers or by the majority of scientists studying this topic.  Most researchers concentrate only on the direct radiation influences which CO2 increases bring about.  They tend not to consider the other related feedback mechanisms which will be simultaneously activated as CO2 amounts increase.  The increased global evaporation from CO2 increase will extract energy from the earth’s surface and enhance surface cooling.  This will act to reduce the pure radiation assumed 1°C warming through both enhanced IR energy flux to space and enhanced surface evaporation.  The more evaporation from a doubling of CO2 will act to further reduce the 1°C direct radiation only temperature response.  As the CO2’s induced speed-up of the globe’s hydrologic cycle continues the cooling influences of the enhanced surface evaporation-precipitation will greatly suppress any pure radiation assumed rise of 1°C.  Doubling CO2 will thus be able to bring about only a quite modest global warming.  The main influence of a doubling of CO2 will be to increase average global precipitation.  

Basic Flaw of the AGW Hypothesis.  It is the climate models parameterization schemes for cumulus convection (particularly the deep cumulonimbus (Cb) convection) which are grossly unrealistic and which completely negates the global modeler’s projections of 2-5°C warming for a doubling of CO2.  This does not mean that the globe won’t be measurably influenced from CO2 doubling.  But this CO2 influence will occur primarily as an enhancement of the global hydrologic cycle (precipitation) and only minimally from a rise in global surface temperature.

The AGW hypothesis that warming from increased CO2 will enhance global rainfall is correct.  But the assumption that this added rainfall and added tropospheric condensation warming will greatly increase upper tropospheric temperature and water-vapor (through the assumption of constancy of relative humidity) is not at all valid.   The opposite occurs.  Increased deep Cb convection causes dryness to the upper troposphere.  The climate modeler’s large increase in upper tropospheric water-vapor and temperature from added CO2 does not agree with the physics of how real-world deep Cb convection functions.  And the additional positive feedback doubling of the upper troposphere warming and moistening which they add to the direct CO2 radiation blockage is completely bogus.  This additional feedback assumption greatly increases the divergence of their model simulations from reality.    

Summary.  The global climate modelers assumed that CO2 enhanced global rainfall will bring about large upper-tropospheric water-vapor and temperature increases.  These upper-level water-vapor increases are then projected to bring about even larger temperature increases and additional water-vapor (positive water-vapor feedback) amounts which add twice as much additional blockage of infrared (IR) energy to space than the initial influence of the CO2 blockage alone.  Such large water-vapor and temperature increases are not at all realistic.  This is the Achilles-heel of the whole AGW theory.

Comment.  None of the global climate modelers or other AGW advocates seem to know that the globe’s deep cumulonimbus (Cb) convection processes act, not to increase upper level water-vapor, but in an opposite sense to reduce the globe’s upper tropospheric water-vapor content.  The global climate modelers live in a very isolated Ivory Tower world.  Their positive water-vapor feedback schemes in their doubling of CO2 simulations shows that they know next to nothing about how the atmosphere’s cumulus convective and moisture processes really function.

Gray Research Project.  I and my Colorado State University (CSU) research project have a long background in studying cumulus convection, and particularly deep and intense cumulonimbus (Cb) convection of the tropics associated with meso-scale rain systems and tropical cyclones.  We have published a lot of material on this subject over many years.  These convective studies appear to provide crucial background information fundamental to establishing the invalidity of the AGW hypothesis.  My CSU project’s over 50 years of tropical meteorology research has, by necessity, had to make the study of cumulus cloud convection a priority item for the understanding of tropical circulations and tropical cyclones.  Our information has been gained from my project’s extensive involvement in many field experiments and from rawinsonde compositing activities over many years and recently through extensive analysis of ISCCP and NOAA Reanalysis data.  To my knowledge, none of the AGW proponents have ever referred to any of my project’s many published papers and project reports.  

Any scientist having advanced and detailed knowledge and working level experience of the globe’s deep cumulus convection process can completely negate the scientific validity of the AGW hypothesis.  This could have been done decades ago if there had been an open and honest debate and further research on how changes in cumulus convective dynamics are related to CO2 increase.  This greatly needed open and objective debate on cumulus convection process began and was taking place during the late 1960s and 1970s.  But these studies were discontinued during the 1980s-1990s when the global models began to show useful results which the politicians, environmentalists, and the world government advocates could use to back up their desired AGW hypothesis.  They did not want any further tampering with the models and the earlier momentum build-up for cumulus-moist process research did not go forward.  The AGW advocates needed to utilize the unrealistic CO2 doubling climate model warming results as a scare mechanism to advance their agendas.  And the CO2 global climate modeling community was quite happy to provide this justification and be well rewarded for their efforts.

Via email

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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

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They're still trying to get that sea-level to rise more

The latest manipulations of the data seem well enough conceived but I think you have to read between the lines at times.  Reducing the estimated overall sea-level rise for the last 20 years is certainly reasonable (conclusion 1 below) but conclusion 2 is a bit more hairy. Hard to see how it gells with conclusion 1.  But, whatever it means, conclusion 2 may not matter. The conclusion 2 change is said only to be "of opposite sign" to previous findings, indicating that it was probably not statistically significant

Unabated global mean sea-level rise over the satellite altimeter era

Christopher S. Watson et al.

The rate of global mean sea-level (GMSL) rise has been suggested to be lower for the past decade compared with the preceding decade as a result of natural variability1, with an average rate of rise since 1993 of +3.2 ± 0.4 mm yr−1 (refs 2, 3).

However, satellite-based GMSL estimates do not include an allowance for potential instrumental drifts (bias drift4, 5). Here, we report improved bias drift estimates for individual altimeter missions from a refined estimation approach that incorporates new Global Positioning System (GPS) estimates of vertical land movement (VLM).

In contrast to previous results (for example, refs 6, 7), we identify significant non-zero systematic drifts that are satellite-specific, most notably affecting the first 6 years of the GMSL record.

Applying the bias drift corrections has two implications. First, the GMSL rate (1993 to mid-2014) is systematically reduced to between +2.6 ± 0.4 mm yr−1 and +2.9 ± 0.4 mm yr−1, depending on the choice of VLM applied. These rates are in closer agreement with the rate derived from the sum of the observed contributions2, GMSL estimated from a comprehensive network of tide gauges with GPS-based VLM applied (updated from ref. 8) and reprocessed ERS-2/Envisat altimetry9.

Second, in contrast to the previously reported slowing in the rate during the past two decades1, our corrected GMSL data set indicates an acceleration in sea-level rise (independent of the VLM used), which is of opposite sign to previous estimates and comparable to the accelerated loss of ice from Greenland and to recent projections2, 10, and larger than the twentieth-century acceleration2, 8, 10.

SOURCE





How Can So Many World Leaders Be So Wrong?

By Alan Caruba

In a recent Daily Caller article, Michael Bastach took note of “25 Years of predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point’.” This is the message that the Earth is warming rapidly and, if we don’t abandon the use of fossil fuels for power, it will arrive to wreak destruction on the human race and all life on the planet.

It is astounding how many past and present world leaders are telling everyone this despite the total lack of any real science, nor any actual warming—the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since 1997!

At the heart of the global warming—now called climate change—“crisis” has been the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that has been issuing apocalyptic predictions since its inception in 1988. None of its predictions have come true. How could they, based as they are on the false science of computer models, not that based on observable climate events and trends?

To this day our own government through its meteorological agencies has been caught manipulating the data gathered over the years to conform with the “warming” scenario. The worst has been the Environmental Protection Agency which is engaged in an effort to shut down coal-fired utilities and access to every other energy source on which we depend to power the nation.

Despite this national and international effort, mostly likely based on the liberal ideology that there are too many humans on the plant and dramatic ways must be found to reduce that number. In the past these anti-humanity advocates could depend on famine, disease and wars to kill off millions, but in the modern world that has become less of a threat.

One libertarian think tank, the Heartland Institute, has been leading the battle against the global warming/climate change hoax for a decade. As a Heartland policy advisor I have had a front row seat. In June, Heartland will sponsor the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change bringing together some of the world’s leading scientists to recommend that it is time for Congress to “take a fresh look at climate science”, “explore better science-based policies for energy and the environment”, and, bluntly stated, to “start over on the question of global warming?”

It did not surprise me to learn that Heartland had dispatched staff to Rome when the Pope announced he too was joining the “climate change” advocates despite its lack of any basis in science. The group garnered tons of international media coverage by simply presenting the truth. You can find out more about them here,  It didn’t take long for Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor and ‘special advisor” to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, to write a commentary condemning global warming “deniers” that appeared on a Catholic website called Pewsitter.

Sachs took particular aim at The Heartland Institute and, despite not attending its Rome press conference or any of the presentations the experts provided, did not hesitate to identify Heartland as having been supported for years by the Koch brothers, known for the support of conservative groups and causes.

Joseph Bast, Heartland president, does not let such cheap shots pass by. “The Heartland Instituter has received just $25,000 from a single organization, a charitable foundation affiliated with the Koch brothers during the past 15 years. Our annual budget is approximately $7 million. Even that small gift was earmarked for our work on health care reform, not global warming. Why does Sachs mention the ‘Koch brothers’ unless his intention is to smear an independent organization by falsely implying a much larger or somehow Improper  level of support from some singularly unpopular billionaires?”

Bast got to the heart of the war being perpetrated by the either misinformed or deliberately lying world leaders of the climate change hoax. “The dishonesty of Sachs’ reference to The Heartland Institute would be startling, coming from a person of Sachs’ stature, if this sort of misrepresentation of facts weren’t so common in the debate over climate change. President Obama sets the tone. Comparing global warming realists to members of the ‘flat earth society’ and rather ominously calling on his supporters to ‘hold climate change denier’s feet to the fire.’”

“Sachs has had a long and distinguished career as an academic and in various government agencies,” said Bast, “but on this issue he is letter his liberal ideology cloud his judgement. His short essay reveals a disturbing lack of knowledge about climate science and compassion toward the billions of people in the world who will be harmed by the UN’s plans to make energy more expensive and less reliable.”

“Sachs ends his essay with a call on people of all faiths to ‘fulfill our moral responsibilities to humanity nd the future of Earth.’ That responsibility starts with truth-telling. Sachs and his colleagues on the left haven’t reach the starting line yet.”

It doesn’t matter if it is the Pope, the President of the United States, or the UN Secretary General if the assertion that the Earth is warming when it is not or that coal, oil and natural gas must be abandoned to “save the Earth.” Whether from ignorance or a dark hidden agenda, the whole of the global warming/climate change is aimed at harming billions, many of whom need the power that this hoax would deny to everyone.

SOURCE






Energy: Private Sector Progress & Public Sector Failure

If there is an opportunity to be made our “free market system” will allow our entrepreneurs to do it. So why aren’t we driving electric cars, or cars that run on biofuel. It may be possible that these ideas are simply unsustainable without a government subsidy. If there is a breakthrough in energy it will happen in the private sector and without government assistance or oversight. This has happened with fracking.

The government has a long list of green energy investments, the most noted one being Solyndra a company trying to make a go at solar. Solyndra costs the tax payers around $500million. It seems like the politicians doling out these subsidies may not be interested in real energy progress, but instead interested in pushing there green energy agenda. Public investments in the myth of green energy are really a waste of our money.

Real progress has been made in fracking (extracting natural gas from rock beneath the earth). Private companies have decided to invest their own money in the development & advancement of this technology and it has payed off big time. Everyone benefits from the this technology. These companies drill for natural gas, employ people in real jobs, and provide a clean source of energy. The more natural gas they extract the more the price of energy declines. That is assuming the current administration doesn’t tax the natural gas to high heaven to pay for green energy failures.fracking

For those people that oppose fracking for gas, the “no drill, no spill” people. I only ask that they stop complaining about the price of energy if they become unreliant on fossil fuels.

SOURCE





Not seeing it as Suzuki sees it

Behind his benign visage, Canada's David Suzuki is arguably the most hysterical Warmist of all

An obstacle to rational decision making in climate policy is the confusion between carbon dioxide (CO2) and air pollution.

Real air pollution, such as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and soot, is important to control and we have done a good job in most of Canada reducing the concentration of these substances.

But CO2, an odourless, colourless gas that is an essential to plant photosynthesis, is not pollution. The poor air quality in China’s cities has nothing to do with CO2.

So why would David Suzuki bring up climate change and Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in his article about air pollution in China? It is because of his concern that GHG emissions, primarily CO2 from human activities, will result in climate problems.

After 18 years with no global warming while CO2 levels have risen 10%, GHG-caused climate concerns are becoming an increasingly difficult sell. So Suzuki and many politicians piggyback debatable climate change concerns on top of genuine pollution worries, apparently hoping they can sell the former by associating it with the latter.

While this tactic might succeed for a while from a public relations perspective, it makes no sense scientifically.  It is akin to promoting the building of an asteroid defense system, an expensive endeavour of highly uncertain value, by associating it with vitally important cancer research.

Suzuki must help society distinguish between unrelated issues, not confuse us with red herrings.

SOURCE  





The Iceman Cometh?

Could a quiescent sun portend a new little ice age: a chilly era for humanity and agriculture?

Paul Driessen

President Obama, Al Gore and other alarmists continue to prophesy manmade global warming crises, brought on by our “unsustainable” reliance on fossil fuels. Modelers like Mike Mann and Gavin Schmidt conjure up illusory crisis “scenarios” based on the assumption that carbon dioxide emissions now drive climate change. A trillion-dollar Climate Crisis industry self-servingly echoes their claims.

But what if these merchants of fear are wrong? What if the sun refuses to cooperate with the alarmists?

“The sun is almost completely blank,” meteorologist Paul Dorian notes. Virtually no sunspots darken the blinding yellow orb. “The main driver of all weather and climate … has gone quiet again during what is likely to be the weakest sunspot cycle in more than a century. Not since February 1906 has there been a solar cycle with fewer sunspots.”

“Going back to 1755, there have been only a few solar cycles that have had a lower number of sunspots during their maximum phase,” Dorian continues. This continued downward trend in solar sunspot cycles began over 20 years ago, when Earth stopped warming. If it continues for a couple more cycles, Earth could be entering another “grand minimum,” an extended period of low solar activity.

That would mean less incoming solar radiation, which could have a marked cooling effect – as happened during previous decades-long episodes of low solar activity. The “Maunder Minimum” lasted 70 years (1645-1715), the “Dalton Minimum” 40 years (1790-1830); they brought even colder global temperatures to the “Little Ice Age.”

Solar activity is in free fall, Reading University (UK) space physicist Mike Lockwood confirms, perhaps “faster than at any time in the last 9,300 years.” He raised the likelihood of another grand minimum to 25% (from 10% three years previously). However, he claims a new little ice age is unlikely.

“Human-induced global warming is already a more important force in global temperatures than even major solar cycles,” Professor Lockwood insists. That warmist mantra may keep him from getting excoriated for even mentioning solar influences. But it ignores Earth’s long history of climate change.

And what if Lockwood is wrong about human influences and the extent of a coming cold era? Habibullo Abdussamatov, director of Russia’s space research laboratory and its global warming research team, is convinced another little ice age is on its way. (See pages 18-21 of this report.) That would be LIA #19.

A couple degrees warmer, with more carbon dioxide in the air, would be good for humanity and planet. Crops, forests and grasslands would grow faster and better, longer growing seasons over larger areas of land would support more habitats, wildlife, agriculture and people – especially if everyone has access to ample, reliable, affordable energy, especially electricity, and modern farming technologies. Most people, including the elderly, can easily handle such warmth, especially if they have air conditioning.

But a couple degrees colder would bring serious adverse consequences for habitats, wildlife, agriculture and humanity. Though geologists say we are overdue for one, this does not mean another Pleistocene ice age – with glaciers obliterating forests and cities under mile-thick walls of ice across North America, Europe, Asia and beyond. Maybe Lockwood is right, and it won’t be a full-blown Little Ice Age déjà vu.

However, Antarctic sea ice just set a new April record. Ice conditions are back to normal in the Arctic. Winters have become longer, colder and snowier. With less meltwater, sea levels are barely rising.

Moreover, a 2-degree drop in average global temperatures would shrink growing seasons, cropland and wildlife habitats. Agriculture would be curtailed across Canada, northern Europe and Russia, putting greater pressure on remaining land to feed hungry families without turning more habitats into cropland. Governments might even have to stop mandating corn for ethanol and devote the land to food crops.

Our ability to feed Earth’s growing population would be seriously impaired, especially since the same factions that wail about fossil fuels, fracking and “dangerous manmade climate change” also despise the chemical fertilizers, insecticides, biotechnology and mechanized farming that would enable us to get far more food per acre under colder conditions, even if crops are starved for plant-fertilizing CO2.

Generally colder conditions can also bring more unpredictable storms and cold snaps during shortened growing seasons. That happened frequently during the last Little Ice Age (1350-1850), resulting in frequent crop failures and bouts of hunger, malnutrition, starvation and disease in much of Europe.

Worst of all, cold kills. Modern homes and buildings with affordable heat make it easy to survive even brutal winters in comfort. However, carbon taxes, restrictions on coal and natural gas, renewable energy mandates and other ill-conceived programs have sent electricity and home heating prices soaring.

When energy is rationed, expensive and unpredictable, businesses lay people off or close their doors. Forced to go on welfare, people’s health and well-being suffer. The elderly are especially susceptible. In Britain, many pensioners now ride buses or sit in libraries all day to stay warm, while others burn used books in stoves (they are cheaper than coal or wood). Thousands die of hypothermia, because they can no longer afford proper heat.

In Germany, Greece and other countries, rising energy costs have caused a surge in illegal tree cutting, as desperate families try to stay warm. Hungry, unemployed families are also poaching wildlife. Meanwhile, forests of wind turbines generate minimal expensive electricity but do slaughter millions of birds and bats every year, leaving crops to be eaten by hordes of insects, across Europe and the United States.

These realities portend what will likely happen on a far larger scale, if we do enter another prolonged cold era under anti-fossil fuel rules imposed in response to global warming hysteria. The specter of widespread turmoil, rising death tolls and climate refugees by the millions could become reality.

And still alarmists say, even if temperatures aren’t rising, we should force developed nations to curtail their energy use and living standards – and modernize developing countries in a “sustainable” manner. We should use the “climate crisis” to “move the world in a greener, more equitable direction.”

As though wind, solar and biofuel energy and widespread organic farming are sustainable, under any objective standard. As though government elites have a right to tell poor countries what level of development, what energy technologies, what farming methods they will be “permitted” to have – and what level of poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death they must continue to suffer.

Ending this insanity must begin with the climate scientists and modelers. They are taking our tax dollars and promoting constant scare stories. They owe it to us to be objective, transparent and willing to discuss and debate these issues with those who question human influences on climate change. They owe it to us to get the predictions right, so that we can be properly prepared, especially if the iceman cometh again.

That means basing their models on all the forces that determine global temperature and climate fluctuations: the sun, cosmic rays, deep ocean currents, volcanoes and other natural forces, as well as the 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere that is carbon dioxide. It means comparing predictions with actual (non-averaged, non-manipulated) real-world observations and data. If the improved models still do not predict accurately, it means revising hypotheses and methodologies yet again, until they square with reality.

Meanwhile, our politicians owe it to us to start basing energy and environmental policies on reality: on how Earth’s climate and weather actually behave – and on how their policies, laws and regulations affect job creation and preservation, economic growth and opportunities, and human health and welfare, especially for poor and minority families, and even more so for the poorest people on our planet.

Via email





Australia:  It’s black and white - this Green’s got to go

FORMER Greens leader Christine Milne’s decision to quit the senate at the next election was greeted by a chorus of blindingly hypocritical hyperbolically overly polite humbug. The political class was doing what it does best, protecting its own.

The real monument to Milne, and her predecessor Bob Brown, is the economically wrecked island state of Tasmania, the putrid petri  dish of the failed Green experiment. According to the ABS figures released yesterday, seasonal unemployment in Tassie last month was 7.3 per cent, more than a full percentage point higher than the national average. That, in large part, is due to the lunacy of the Green leadership in the state and nationally.

With the willing assistance of former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke and his political fixer, former environment minister Graham Richardson, the Tasmanian economy was effectively torpedoed when the Greens (still in their formative years) launched their first successful major anti-dam campaign, around the Franklin River.
The dam, which would have supplied the island state with cheap, non-fossil fuel-based hydro-electric power, was killed to please left-wing voters living in inner-urban Labor seats on the mainland.

The campaign cost Labor support in Tasmania but the emergent Greens knew that it was electorally more pragmatic to save a Tasmanian river than Tasmanian jobs.

There were echoes of those early Tasmanian campaigns in the recent NSW state election where the tree-hugging Greens won seats campaigning against the safe extraction of natural gas in areas where there was no CSG extraction.

In areas where gas extraction or forestry provides actual employment — that is, in areas where workers do more than turn on a power-hungry computer — the Greens don’t fare too well.

Milne’s political career was launched with another employment-destroying campaign, the blocking of the Wesley Vale pulp mill, a mill designed to meet standards more stringent than any other similar project in the world.

Tasmania’s quaint Hare-Clark electoral system delivered her a seat in its house of assembly in 1989. She went to the senate in 2004.

Throughout the dysfunctional Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government she distinguished herself with wild claims on climate change and was rewarded with billions of dollars’ worth of unproductive alternate energy projects which taxpayers will be bankrolling for generations.

Though no reputable scientific organisation in the world has linked a specific weather event to climate change, the former schoolteacher (English, history and social science) has never failed to drag extreme weather events into her unreal vision of an impending apocalyptic warmist fantasy.

“Global warming is driving extreme weather events around the world and the debate needs to be on the impacts of global warming,” she told a press conference after a typhoon devastated the Philippines in November 2013.

“Tony Abbott has created a phony debate in Australia. He never is prepared to talk about the connection between extreme weather events and global warming because he knows that tugs at people’s heartstrings,” she said.  “He knows ... that the Australian people will start joining the dots.”

If people did actually join the dots, they would have realised long ago that Milne was just plain dotty.

“Do you want death or do you want coal?” she asked late last year.

“Coal is bad for humanity and Tony Abbott is bad for Australia.”

Coal actually remains the cheapest source of energy in the world and has been responsible for markedly lowering the gap between the richest and poorest people in the world in recent decades.

Wacky Milne never knew when to stop, and harboured an overwhelming obsession with Abbott, even issuing a press release about the highly dubious claim that he had sought to unilaterally engage 3500 Australian troops in a ground offensive.  Though it was later proven to be false, Milne still found it a “frightening insight into a leader whose solution to everything is more aggression”.

The hope is that the new Green leader, Richard Di Natale, is a little more grounded.

Reading his maundering maiden speech, there is little to believe he will offer anything more than any other textbook inner-city sandalista, despite donning a three-piece suit for his first press conference.

When he faces his first test of realpolitik, will he support the increase in the fuel excise, which the Greens have so far stupidly rejected? Will he cling to the notion that people must be forced on to public transport at the expense of much-needed super highways?

Will he oppose the building of Sydney’s exciting new airport and support the closure of the existing under-utilised and curfew-burdened Kingsford Smith Airport — because it is too close to the Green heartlands of Ultimo and Newtown?

Given that Di Natale embraced his new role without any consultation with the party’s membership (how does that fit with their libertarian ideals?) and basks in the unreal and undeserved sense of moral superiority that Greens claim for themselves, little is likely to change with the switch in leaders.

SOURCE

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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.  

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Warmism as the folly of the intellectuals

That scientists working in climate-related fields embrace Warmism is no surprise.  The scare has produced a downpour of research grants into their grateful hands. And everybody likes $$$$.   So that needs no further explanation.  In law one often asks cui bono? (to whose beneft?) in deciding guilt or innocence so the same enquiry suggests why climate scientists nearly all have something good to say about Warmism.  It would be rather amazing if they had anything bad to say about it.

What DOES need explaining, however, is that academics and  intellectuals almost ALL support global warming.  It's not just climate scientists.  We saw that recently in the uproar that resulted when Bjorn Lomborg was invited to set up a think-tank at the University of Western Australia. Almost EVERYBODY at the university seemed to be against Lomborg and, as a result, the university backed down and withdrew the invitation to Lomborg.

So what is it that makes so many smart and highly educated people into Warmists?  Being smart is the key.  As we shall see, being smart tends to make you authoritarian and that leads down a short road to Warmism. 

The Bolsheviks were all middle class intellectuals and, although it is common these days to call Mussolini a buffoon, he read poetry and philosophy voraciously, including Socrates and Plato. He spoke several foreign languages, was always interested in discussing political and philosophical ideas with almost anyone, had considerable acceptance in his early days as a leading Marxist theoretician, wrote over 40 books, and was a tree-lover and environmentalist 50 years before Greenies were thought of.

And what is authoritarianism?  The Bolsheviks and Mussolini were undoubtedly both authoritarian and socialist, so is it socialism that makes you authoritarian?

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His excellent short essay On Authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

And Warmism divides politics quite sharply.  Almost all Leftists accept it and almost all conservatives reject it. It is as good a hallmark of Leftism as any and better than most.  And another major marker for Leftism is academic status.  Teachers in the universities and colleges are overwhelmingly Leftist.  Conservatives are a small and oppressed minority there.  As a former academic myself, I have seen it close up.  So why would academics be elitist and authoritarian?

 The answer is really quite simple.  If your life had made you feel superior to most people wouldn't you want to be treated in a superior way too?  More importantly, wouldn't you feel that your inferiors should be got out of your way and told what to do?  Wouldn't you feel that they should be herded onto public transport and thus leave the roads free for you to drive where you want without being held up by traffic jams?  That is EXACTLY how elite Leftists think.  Only they cannot say that out loud of course.  To say it out loud would not only be obnoxious but it would also achieve nothing.   So our elites are smarter than that.  They know they have to cloak their oppression  in the mantle of a claim that "It's all for your own good".  And knowing how  rich, clever and well-organized they themselves are, they are confident that they will be able to escape the limits and confines that they put on other people.  Even high taxes are no worry to them when they already have most things that money can buy.  So regulate, regulate, regulate is their cry.  And regulating and controlling others is what Leftists have always got 1,001 reasons for  -- with the most extreme form of control being exercised in Communist regimes.

And a very large percentage of the "knowledge class" generally is directly hired or subsidized by the government.  As Peter Berger notes:  "it thus has an interest in the expansion of those public functions that furnish it with employment and subsidies, and also with power and status. The "knowledge class," therefore, is favorable toward the reinforcement of public programs. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that its constitutive interests push it toward leftist politics.... there is a clash between those whose principal interest is production and those whose principal interest is redistribution"

(From "A Far Glory. The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity", New York, The Free Press, 1992)

And as this writer notes:

"The Democrats are the party of the elite. Consider Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. In a 1948 student poll Thomas E. Dewey [R] beat Harry Truman [D] by 2 to 1. In 2000 Al Gore [D] beat Bush [R], an Andover alumnus, by nearly the same margin, reflecting the Democrats' historic capture in 2000 of "professionals," a group well-represented among the parents of Andover students. Next to African-Americans, the most reliable Democrats in the electorate are women with post-graduate degrees".

And there is another reason why teachers -- particularly at the university and college level -- are overwhelmingly Leftist and authoritarian.  It is pretty simple.  Whether or not they are very good at it, Leftists would like to be dominant and to boss other people around -- and that is very much the teacher's role.  It is an elite role.  Even a social misfit can get to rule the roost in teaching (and I don't think many people who know the universities well will have any trouble naming a lot of oddballs and misfits there).  So teaching will tend to attract Leftists and elitists in the first place.  As this writer put it:

"As I said, liberalism is a psychology, not an ideology. And as such, it's unreasonable to expect it to be limited to a person's politics; it should show through to many different aspects of a person's life, and it does. Liberals tend to dominate fields like academia, the news and entertainment media, and the legal professions, and they populate the elite social circles, all because they're so concerned with their egos.

In academia, teachers and professors are revered as wise and accomplished, and they exercise almost absolute power over dozens to hundreds of students. People in the media are famous and seen as powerful, intelligent, charismatic, and accomplished. Lawyers have enormous power over people's lives, and like celebrities are seen as intelligent, charismatic, and accomplished, and are also generally seen as moral people (by people who substitute law for morality). Judges are esteemed and seen as a source of wisdom and knowledge, and they too hold enormous power over people's lives and are seen as moral in the same way lawyers are."

So I think we now have a good explanation of why intellectuals, particularly in the colleges and universities, are overwhelmingly Warmist.  By proclaiming a planetary emergency that can only be solved by regulating most aspects of people's lives, they get to gain the sort of power over the population that they and all Leftists dream of. 

Warmism is the folly of the intellectuals because it serves their Leftist authoritarianism.  And, sadly, because of the respect which is normally accorded to knowledge and those who possess it, the Warmist tale gets far more respect than it deserves.  It survives solely because of the prestige of those who proclaim it.  And, in turn, that is why almost all defenses of Warmism consist solely of an appeal to authority -- academic authority. Any defense of it based on the facts fails very rapidly under informed scrutiny.  Given the fact that a heated molecule will radiate its heat in all directions, it is not even a good theory.

So for dishonorable reasons most intellectuals espouse a falsehood.  They will all be laughed at by posterity and we climate skeptics will be creditably remembered. Their children and grandchildren (if any) will one day be ashamed of them for failing as scientists and whoring for a false god.   They undoubtedly enjoy more "lurks and perks" than most skeptics do so one hopes they enjoy their 30 pieces of silver. All frauds implode eventually so who knows how long they will enjoy their silver. Judas did not enjoy his silver for long.

Christians might like to reflect on the words of Jesus concerning the intellectuals of his day -- the Pharisees.  In Matthew chapter 6 Jesus said repeatedly of them "They have their reward" in the here and now but he also said that the ultimate reward goes to those who do NOT do as the Pharisees do -- JR






UK: "Eco-homes" could be deadly

Insulation used to keep buildings warm in the winter traps TOO MUCH heat in summer --potentially putting residents at risk

Eco-homes risk roasting residents by overheating in summer, researchers warned yesterday.  The low energy homes – billed as a solution to rising fuel costs – can heat up to more than 25C (77F) for days at a time.

Researchers from Coventry University tracked temperatures inside eco-homes over three summers and found 72 per cent failed their design criteria.  The study was conducted at a housing association in the city, where flats were fitted to German Passivhaus – or ‘passive house’ – standards, meaning they have very low energy consumption.

It found heat built up inside the homes faster than ventilation could remove it, leaving residents facing uncomfortable temperatures.

One of them, Emma Taylor, 33, told the Sunday Times: ‘Last summer was a nightmare. I was pregnant and the flat was red hot.’

Passive homes can cut heating bills by up to 90 per cent, but there have been repeated warnings about the dangers of overheating.

They have proven so efficient that even the heat from a plasma television can affect temperatures inside.

A separate study by Cardiff University found temperatures inside such houses would exceed 25C for five to ten per cent of the year in London – and could exceed 28C (82F) from 2050 if our climate warms up as predicted.

Britain has relatively few eco-homes, but building regulations mean all new homes must meet tough energy consumption standards from 2020.

Architect Lynne Sullivan, a member of the Passivhaus Trust, said: ‘There is a danger of overheating in all homes built to the new regulations, particularly flats, and we have been warning the Government.’

Peter Warm, one of Britain’s three accredited Passivhaus certifiers, said: ‘When you do low-carbon housing with a lot of insulation, you can solve the warmth problem only to get overheating in summer.  'The challenge is to get the right balance.’

The Building Research Establishment said it had launched a project to examine overheating in urban developments.

SOURCE  






Reality strikes: Forecasting Antarctic sea ice has to account for INCREASING ice

THE size and power of ships needed to break through Antarctica's increasing sea ice levels is a worry for the global research community


IN recent years countries including Australia have battled to reach their stations on the frozen continent, making resupply missions time consuming and expensive, Australian Antarctic Division spokesman Rod Wooding said.  "We're noticing that the sea ice situation is becoming more difficult," he told reporters on Monday.

The sea ice through the Southern Ocean and around Australia's Mawson Station usually breaks up for a couple of months a year allowing ships to enter the bay but that did not happen in 2013-14.

"We had to get fuel in by helicopter which is inadequate for the long-term sustainability of the station," Dr Wooding said.
"Other national programs have had similar problems: the French in particular, Japanese also."

The problem has been the main driver for a meeting of more than 50 international experts, convening in Hobart until Wednesday, to try and nut out a plan to accurately forecast sea ice levels.  Meteorologists along with ice and Antarctic experts will take part in a series of workshops, looking at trends in satellite imagery and the environment.

"One of the things that Antarctic programs will need to understand going forward is what sort of ice breaking capability we're going to need to get through the ice in these areas," Dr Wooding said.
"Australia is currently in a tender process for a new ice breaker ... and it's important in understanding what sort of ice breaker we might need ... to have a good understanding of likely sea ice conditions."

There is no single reason why sea ice levels are increasing but Hobart-based expert Tony Worby said it tends to gather around icebergs and wind patterns also play a part.  "We know sea ice extent is increasing, there was a record maximum in September 2014," Prof Worby said.

"It's quite hard to forecast but whatever effort we put in to improving our ability to forecast sea ice will ultimately pay dividends in terms of savings for national programs."

SOURCE  





Helping People Today Should Be Vatican’s Priority

Reasons why the projected encyclical should probably be dropped

Of all the senior ecclesiastical Christian leaders in the world today, one you would expect to thoroughly understand the problems faced by the poor of Africa would be Ghanaian cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson. Born into a poor family in Western Ghana, Cardinal Turkson was the fourth among ten children of a carpenter father and a mother who sold vegetables in the open market.

Although Ghana’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the world today, the country has less than one-tenth the GDP per capita of the United States. Life expectancy at birth in Ghana is 20 years less than that in developed countries. This is largely because about 40% of its citizens lack electricity. A 2013 World Bank report explained that Ghana’s energy sector risks becoming “a drag on the economy” if large investments in power generation are not soon made.

Happily, a 1,200 MW coal-fired electricity generating station is being developed to come on line in Ghana by 2018. This will help pull millions of people out of poverty.

Given his native country’s opportunities and the severe problems it faces, one would expect Cardinal Turkson to use the opportunity of his opening address at the Vatican’s April 28 climate change conference to remind delegates that fulfilling the critical needs of today’s people should be their paramount objective. After all, the purpose of the event was to examine “The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Humanity” so as to provide support for the first ever encyclical letter from a pope devoted entirely to the environment, expected to be released in June.

As President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, a group particularly concerned with social development, Turkson should have warned delegates that, in their zeal cut back on the use of hydrocarbon fuels, they must do nothing that would interfere with providing inexpensive electricity to countries such as Ghana.

Given the Council’s interest on social justice, you would also expect Turkson to focus strongly on the importance of helping vulnerable people adapt to climate change, whatever the cause. He should have condemned the fact that, of the $1 billion spent every day on climate finance across the world, only 6% of it goes to adaptation, the rest being squandered trying to stop climate change that might someday happen.

Sadly, Turkson said nothing about energy and little about adaptation in his address. Instead he reinforced the reasons many at the conference want to block further development of inexpensive coal-fired power plants, asserting, “Today, the ever-accelerating burning of fossil fuels that powers our economic engine is disrupting the earth’s delicate ecological balance on almost-unfathomable scale.”

The Ghanaian cardinal even cited Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s claim that it is a sin “for humans to degrade the integrity of Earth by causing changes in its climate.”

Turkson then listed “the increasing prevalence of extreme weather events” as a consequence of climate change, a connection that has been soundly refuted by leading scientists across the world. Blaming developed nations for the climate problems faced by poor nations, he encouraged the conference to “think of the positive message it would send for churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples all over the world to become carbon neutral.”

Turkson thereby helped set the stage for the conference’s final “Declaration of Religious Leaders, Political Leaders, Business Leaders, Scientists and Development Practitioners,” a document University of Western Ontario climate model expert Professor Chris Essex labels “gibberish.” The declaration included the nonsensical ‘King Canute clause’ about keeping global warming below 2 degrees C as if we possessed a global thermostat. It totally ignored the dire energy needs of the world’s poorest people, said little about adaptation, and instead promoted a dangerous “rapid world transformation to a world powered by renewable and other low-carbon energy.”

Calling for “brave and determined” guidance from religious leaders, Turkson told delegates that actions on climate change “must be grounded in morality, oriented by morality and measured in terms of human flourishing and well-being.” If June’s encyclical letter on the environment is to encourage this objective, then Pope Francis must have the courage to ignore the politically correct but irresponsible advice of his advisors, and simply tell the truth: climate will continue to change no matter what we do.

So let’s help the world’s poor to the degree we can afford by providing them with reliable, inexpensive electricity and stop pretending we have a crystal ball to future climate states.

SOURCE  





Don’t try to play god with the climate

By Tom Harris (an engineer who works in thermo-fluid sciences)

The mistaken belief that science is sufficiently advanced that we can make reliable climate forecasts and even control future climate states is resulting in tragedies far greater than the possibility of any realistically foreseeable human-caused global warming.

Of the $1 billion spent every day across the world on climate finance, only about 1/20th of it goes to assisting people adapt to the very real climate change they are experiencing today. The remaining 94 percent, according to the Climate Policy Initiative, is wasted trying to stop climate change that might or might not someday happen.

This misappropriation is largely because groups like Joseph Robertson’s Citizens Climate Lobby have convinced politicians that humans control our planet’s climate as if we had a thermostat (“Climate lobbyist to speak at UMD,” April 27). All we need do is reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide, they say.

Reports such as those of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (climatechangereconsidered.org) demonstrate that this is ridiculous.

Let’s help people in today’s world to the degree we can afford and forget about playing god with the climate.

SOURCE  






Three Simple Facts that Scuttle the Global Warming Paradigm

Cutting through the fog: a primer for the layman

The putative climate “debate” that has been raging for the last thirty years or so has now reached the point of duncical irrationality. (I put “debate” in scare quotes since what we are observing is not so much a debate as an ideological crusade that brooks no resistance; in effect, a political jihad against those who oppose the Warmist orthodoxy.) The upcoming Paris COP (climate treaty conference) slated for December of this year, which Obama is expected to ratify, renders the situation increasingly urgent.

The world’s leading politicians, abetted by the dubious claims of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are plainly eager to sign an accord which, if implemented, would lead to record levels of poverty and unemployment in both the developed and Third worlds. In the words of Director of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) Tom Harris, “in formulating public policy on climate change, our leaders gloss over the uncertainties and close the door to evidence that does not fit the alarmist agenda.” There is little any concerned citizen can do but register his skepticism, doubts and defiance — that is, his resolute and fact-based denial, despite the social and professional stigma associated with being a “denier” and the threat of various forms of punitive action, especially in the academy. (See, for example, the “Statement on Climate Change”  professing allegiance to the IPCC signed by the faculty of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A & M University. Skeptics, regardless of their credentials, would never be hired in such a restrictive milieu.) By marshalling the reasons justifying such denial and disseminating them to the public, one hopes against hope to mitigate the disaster — not the so-called meteorological “disaster” of global warming but the economic disaster of uncertain science and crippling legislation — before it becomes irreversible.

The claim that we have heard bandied about for years is that the “science is settled” — a malapropism if ever there was one since the central principle of scientific thinking is that science by its very nature is never settled. There is always more to learn, always something to revise, correct and expand, always the possibility of a paradigm shift, as Thomas Kuhn famously explained in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The issue at hand is one of making decisions predicated on the best evidence available — the essential proviso being that the evidence is solid, authentic and comprehensive. This has manifestly not been the case in what has now become the global warming boondoggle, as we shall note shortly.

Amidst the blizzard of details, theories and confident assertions animating the global warming gospel, one can simplify the counter-argument by listing three attested facts that should settle, if not the science, certainly the furor that clouds our judgment. The matter is really not that complicated. These three facts, which no responsible scientist can deny, are the following:

1. There has been no global warming for the last eighteen years and counting. Warmists like to call this quiescent period of zero net warming a “Pause,” but there is no evidence to suggest a double-digit hiatus in process. The word “Pause” is a palpable evasion intended to maintain an unproven contention. What we do know is that during the years in which apocalyptic claims of imminent catastrophe have been indefatigably circulated, the temperature has remained stable. There is no getting around the thermometer.

2. The grounds of testimony advancing the global warming dogma are brazenly suspect and, in many instances, spurious. To cite only a few, well-known examples, there is the discredited computer models pre-programmed to advance the cause of global warming or “climate change.” Warmist researchers tend to omit important variables from their computer models, such as atmospheric humidity, sea-level pressure and long-range cycle activity. As adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute Steven Milloy writes, deploring the temptation of these researchers to guestimate the future, “Because we do not fully understand the climate system and do not know how to represent such important functions as cloud formation…many of Earth’s climate processes are parameterized (i.e., faked) in models.” According to mathematician and former carbon consultant to the Australian government David Evans, the IPCC models are wrong and the mathematics show that the human signature in the atmosphere is missing. Jonathan Newman, an environmental biologist at the University of Guelph, has also confirmed such skeptical conclusions. Newman and his colleagues reveal that the 31 computer climate models used by the IPCC produce different results: “this shows that…predicting the biological impacts of climate change can vary depending on which climate model is being used.” The beat goes on.

As I wrote in Global Warning, “Climate modeling is notoriously capricious, which may explain why many of its forecasts are conveniently projected a century into the future when they cannot be refuted by opponents of the theory….Climate modeling is really climate meddling.” The literature critically examining the defectiveness and unreliability of climate computer modeling is extensive and readily accessible.

Then there is the debunking of Michael Mann’s notorious “hockey stick” graph that served as the basis for analytical projections. Refusing to disclose his “hockey stick” metadata in judicial proceedings that he himself initiated against his critics, Tim Ball and Mark Steyn, Mann is now facing massive damage suits. When the plinth corrodes, the statue tumbles.

Which bring us to the Hadley “Climategate” scam, divulged in a cache of hacked emails, which revealed the extent of data-suppression and revisionist hijinks embraced by the movement’s proponents and leading “experts.” This outrage should have put paid to the entire controversy. A second bundle of “hide the decline” email dumps, known as Climategate 2.0, has confirmed that “climate science” has been cooked. The lead researcher at the East Anglia CRU (Climate Research Unit), Phil Jones, had gone so far as to recommend deleting all incriminating emails and/or changing the wording of others. A.W. Montford’s Hiding the Decline is a definitive exposé of the great deception known as global warming, as is Tim Ball’s The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science,which also discloses the vast wealth-transfer scheme the lurks behind the political and “scientific” camouflage.

Then there are the emission-belching lifestyles of some of the movement’s chief advocates — e.g. Obama and his family, Nancy Pelosi and others in the Democrat administration, jetting about indiscriminately on personal business. Al Gore enjoying a lifestyle which uses twenty times the national average of electric power, apart from other kinds of energy consumption. Richard Branson, described by Norman Rogers of the Heartland Institute, as “the owner of an airline that gulps jet fuel by the tanker load [and who] whines about global warming.” Coupled with such wildly conspicuous energy consumption,  the message of retrenchment and carbon chastity we are supposed to internalize is irremediably tarnished. (Ironically, the danger we are facing appears to be the onset of a period of global cooling as the Holocene Interglacial we are currently experiencing may soon come to an end. John and Katherine Imbrie’s Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery offers an authoritative account of glacial cycles.)

3. As undeniably respectable scientists like Nobel laureate Fred Singer, co-author with Dennis Avery of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, and Robert Zubrin have pointed out, CO2, a natural fertilizer, is a positive benefit to human and animal life on the planet. Zubrin has decisively shown in The Merchants of Despair that there exists robust scientific proof derived from ice core data and isotopic ratios in marine organism remains that CO2 emissions create surplus plant growth that in turn absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus restoring climate equilibrium over the long haul, and that under conditions of cyclical global warming agricultural productivity naturally increases and human life improves immensely. This is a fact that has been thoroughly misunderstood as people have been brainwashed by politicians and their cronies who have invested in “green energy,” by a cadre of compromised scientists dependent on government research grants and now constrained to defend their reputations, and by a compliant media consortium.

As one enters into the science and pseudo-science dealing with climate change, it becomes obvious that the discipline is enormously complex, as is the subject studied, and that the intricacy of analysis and argument transcends the compass of any short paper or article. Nonetheless, when it comes to assessing the truth claims of the Warmist constituency, the three facts cited here, all easily accessible, are sufficient to clarify the scope and nature of the climate hoax that has been foisted upon us. Indeed, it is not necessary for the layman to come to grips with the myriad conclusions stemming from empirical and theoretical practice, which he has not been trained to evaluate with mathematical rigor. For those who have neither the time nor the expertise to negotiate the convolutions of the “debate” or weigh the import of figures, graphs, interpretation of data and the like, the question devolves into one of trust. And one cannot trust shysters, incompetents, hypocrites and operators who are embedded in the Warmist ingroup. It is enough to remark their discrepancies, sophistries, extenuations and disreputable behaviors to see that their deposition lacks credibility. It is, on the contrary, the members of the climate outgroup who are acting responsibly, both in their research and comportment.

In light of the above, no sensible and reasonably informed person can continue to support or allow himself to be influenced by what augurs to be the greatest scandal of the modern era.

SOURCE  

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