Massive Government Report Says Climate Is Warming And Humans Are The Cause

Government findings often reverse themselves in time (e.g. on peanut allergy, dietary fat etc) so this report has no special authority.  It is just an uncritical  regugitation of the orthodoxy. It's mostly prophecy and when they do get down to facts they are on very shaky ground.  They speak for instance of rapid sea-level rises.  But recent very sophisticated examinations of sea levels conclude that there is no such trend.  And so it goes.  It's just more of the usual speculation


It is "extremely likely" that human activities are the "dominant cause" of global warming, according to the most comprehensive study ever of climate science by U.S. government researchers.

The climate report, obtained by NPR, notes that the past 115 years are "the warmest in the history of modern civilization." The global average temperature has increased by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over that period. Greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture are by far the biggest contributor to warming.

The findings contradict statements by President Trump and many of his Cabinet members, who have openly questioned the role humans play in changing the climate.

"I believe that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do," EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said in an interview earlier this year. "There's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact."

That is not consistent with the conclusions of the 600-plus-page Climate Science Special Report, which is part of an even larger scientific review known as the fourth National Climate Assessment. The NCA4, as it's known, is the nation's most authoritative assessment of climate science. The report's authors include experts from leading scientific agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Department of Energy, as well as academic scientists.

The report states that the global climate will continue to warm. How much, it says, "will depend primarily on the amount of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) emitted globally." Without major reductions in emissions, it says, the increase in annual average global temperature could reach 9 degrees Fahrenheit relative to pre-industrial times. Efforts to reduce emissions, it says, would slow the rate of warming.

"This is good, solid climate science," says Richard Alley, a geoscientist at Penn State University, who says he made minor contributions to the report's conclusions on sea level rise. "This has been reviewed so many times in so many ways, and it's taking what we know from ... a couple of centuries of climate science and applying it to the U.S."

The assessments are required by an act of Congress; the last one was published in 2014. Alley says this year's goes further in attributing changes in weather to the warming climate, especially weather extremes. "More heat waves and fewer cold snaps, this is very clear," he says. The report also notes that warmer temperatures have contributed to the rise in forest fires in the West and that the incidence of those fires is expected to keep rising.

Some of the clearest effects involve sea level rise. "Coastal flooding, you raise the mean level of the ocean, everything else equal you get more coastal flooding," Alley says. The report notes that sea level has risen 7 to 8 inches since 1900, and 3 inches of that occurred since 1993. The report says that rate is faster than during any century over the past 2,800 years.

The report also points out that heavy rainfall is increasing in intensity and frequency across the U.S., especially in the Northeast, and that is expected to keep increasing.

Other connections are harder to nail down, Alley says, such as whether a particular hurricane can be attributed to climate change.

"The Climate Science Special Report is like going to a doctor and being given a report on your vital signs," says environmental scientist Rachel Licker of the Union of Concerned Scientists. She notes that the authors assessed more than 1,500 scientific studies and reports in making their conclusions.

Alley adds that the new report "does a better job of seeing the human fingerprint in what's happening." He says that while he hasn't read all of it yet, he sees no evidence that it has been soft-pedaled or understates the certainty of the science.

Alley notes that "there's a little rumbling" among climate scientists who are concerned that the Trump administration will ignore this effort. "I think the authors really are interested in seeing [the report] used wisely by policymakers to help the economy as well as the environment."

The report has been submitted to the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Trump has yet to choose anyone to run that office; it remains one of the last unfilled senior positions in the White House staff.

SOURCE




Gigantic Totten glacier in Antarctica is 'melting from beneath' and could cause sea levels to rise 11 FEET

The predictions are all speculation and not very logical speculation at that.  The glacier can only be affected by upwelling if it is floating ice.  And if it is floating ice it would not cause the sea level to rise one iota by melting

With the potential to cause sea levels to rise by more than 11 feet and unleash the ice of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the massive Totten Glacier has come to be known as the ‘sleeping giant.’

And now, scientists have discovered that strong winds over the Southern Ocean could be causing it to wake up.

A new study has found that East Antarctica’s largest glacier is melting from beneath, as winds transport warm water to the ice – and, these winds are expected to intensify with climate change, the experts warn.

In the study, led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, used satellite images and wind stress data to investigate the effect of wind on the water beneath the glacier.

While the glacier is known to speed up some years, it also slows down in others.

The research revealed that the glacier’s flow speeds up when winds over the Southern Ocean are strong.

These winds pull warm water up from the deep ocean, in a process known as upwelling.

The warm water climbs to the continental shelf – and, once it reaches the coast, it circulates beneath a floating chunk of the glacier, and causes the ice sheet to melt from below, according to the researchers.

‘Totten has been called the sleeping giant because it’s huge and has been seen as insensitive to changes in its environment,’ said lead author Chad Greene, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).

‘But we’ve shown that if Totten is asleep, it’s certainly not in a coma – we’re seeing signs of responsiveness, and it might just take the wind blowing to wake it up.’

Wind strength varies from year to year, the researchers explain.

But, climate change is expected to intensify the winds over the Southern Ocean, which could, in turn, effect the melting of the Totten Glacier.

The process does not require the air or ocean temperatures to rise – instead, upwelling occurs as the wind displaces the surface water, making way for the deeper, warmer water.

‘It’s like when you blow across a hot bowl of soup and little bits of noodles from the bottom begin to swirl around and rise to the top,’ said Greene.

The new study follows up on previous research led by a team with the Australian Antarctic Division at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center.

That research found that the warm water below Totten causes the glacier to detach from the seafloor, and instead float.

This can cause the flow to further accelerate.

‘The remaining question was, why do the canyons beneath Totten get flushed with warm water some years and cold water other years,’ said Jason Roberts, a glaciologist who led the earlier study.

The findings suggest melting at Totten could become more extreme as winds grow stronger with climate change.

‘Ice sheet sensitivity to wind forcing has been hypothesized for a long time, but it takes decades of observation to show unequivocal cause and effect,’ said Donald Blankenship, a senior researcher at UTIG who contributed to this study and Roberts’ study.

‘Now we’re at the point where we can explicitly show the links between what happens in the atmosphere, what happens in the ocean, and what happens to the Antarctic Ice Sheet.’

SOURCE




The changing world energy economy

Ingenuity and efficiency are reducing links between economic growth and energy consumption

James E. Smith and Alex Hatch

In recent years, particularly in the United States, we have seen substantial a change in public opinion regarding the production and distribution of energy, as well as its associated costs in the marketplace.

A good deal of that opinion can be attributed to publicity behind the push for green energy, coupled with misunderstandings of how energy is provided and paid for. However, the actual market changes that are occurring are more related to general business considerations, not public opinion.

For example, according to a recent report from Bloomberg, the United States economy has begun to grow steadily despite falling oil consumption. Up until the last decade, this phenomenon was unthinkable. Indeed, oil consumption and gross domestic product (GDP) were perfectly synchronized in their trends for many years – and the same trend was observed for overall energy consumption in both the United States and the world. For decades, energy consumption and GDP were linked and synched globally with economic growth.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy demand grew by only 0.8 percent in 2015, whereas the total GDP of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations grew by 2.7 percent – over three times the rate of energy demand. The OECD includes 35 countries in North America, Australia and Europe that are among the world’s most developed.

This marginal energy increase also flies in the face of population growth, another factor that has historically tracked with energy consumption. In 2015, the world population grew by roughly 1.2 percent, again showing that we are somehow supplying energy for more people while simultaneously consuming less per capita.

The IEA calculates that total final consumption (TFC) of energy decreased by 3.3 Exajoules (1018 Joules) between 2013 and 2015. That amount is roughly equal to what Australia consumed during the same period. So how are we providing energy for growing numbers of people while using less per person? The answer is due in part to steadily increasing efficiencies, and is also buried in the value that energy brings to survival and societal growth.

In recent years, through more efficient appliances on the consumer side and industrial equipment on the commercial side, we have been able to produce goods in higher quantity and at higher quality, while consuming energy at low enough levels per unit to essentially negate the energy use of the entire continent of Australia.

We also build more energy efficient homes and businesses that require fewer raw materials and consume less energy in their operation. We are traveling more but in more energy-efficient vehicles, both privately and commercially. Moreover, given the choice, many consumers will opt for short- or long-term energy cost savings – while others will realize their savings through sharply lower fuel prices and select larger or more powerful vehicles that meet their other needs.

This indicates that future energy need and use conundrums may not be solved simply with alternative “green” energy technologies. Instead, they may more likely be resolved first via wider acceptance and advancement of newer, more efficient energy systems, and second through a wider array of pricing choices for consumers.

Energy acquisition and accessibility is an appreciable portion of the costs of living in any culture. Because cultures require growing levels of technological sophistication in order to advance, costs associated with energy must be kept within a range that allows the social order to mature to a point where personal survival becomes less of a full-time requirement.

America has created a culture that values energy efficiency and the economic savings that it generates.  We are also learning to value the accessibility and reliability of energy, while understanding that the value and cost of energy are not necessarily linked. The true value of dependable, accessible, low-cost energy can best be understood by looking at the billions of people living in developing countries.

A brief study of their child mortality, adult longevity, and the diseases, deprivations and environmental conditions they are forced to endure speaks volumes to why low cost, freely accessible, reliable and environment-friendly energy is so essential. “Free” energy will never be achievable, but reducing the burden of energy costs against total income is an essential goal for any nation or world that intends to mature and progress as a productive society.

Future efficiency improvements will be seen most in the developing world, especially in India and parts of Southeast Asia, which have begun to rapidly industrialize in recent years, primarily thus far by using coal to generate electricity to power homes, hospitals, businesses and communities. As these newly developing countries begin to adopt modern consumer electronics, it is likely that their average consumer will look not only at up-front costs of appliances, but also at their efficiency and long-term costs.

This will create markets that are eager to get electronics which couple modern efficiency with low lifecycle and operating costs. It is up to today’s designers and engineers to face and meet the growing demand for these higher efficiency technologies, in order provide more responsive economic paths toward widespread energy use at lower energy intensities.

The efficiency increases that will likely come about within the next few decades are certainly not the final answer to all the world’s energy problems. However, it is already apparent that we have momentarily satiated our growing hunger for energy through these recent advancements, with the expectation that more will come in the near future.

During the next few decades, even marginal efficiency improvements could greatly offset growing overall global energy use. Such improvements could largely eliminate the need to add any new overall energy production capacity. That would allow us to focus on the important development of new energy technologies that may not yet even be on the drawing boards, or even in our imaginations.

By using these efficiency increases as a stopgap measure, we can expand research and development into next generation high-efficiency systems – including wind, solar, oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear. Using these newly developed technologies could, in turn, lead to more a reliable, lower cost, more sustainable energy future for the USA and world.

That world would mean energy accessibility is a given, and not a line separating the haves from the have-nots. It would mean the only thing limiting our future progress and comity is our imagination and ingenuity.

Via email




Are Wind Power and Biofuels Really Green? How Germany’s ‘Energy Transition’ is destroying wildlife and forests

Michael Miersch

The German Green Party was founded in 1980. The Greens promised to save nature. They wanted to be the protectors of forests, birds and rivers. But their policies have led to the most widespread destruction of nature in Germany since the Second World War.

No industry consumes as much land as the generation of ‘natural electricity’. Without the pressure from the Greens and their friends in the environmental NGOs, the German governments of chancellors Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel would not have pushed the expansion of wind power, bioenergy and solar energy as much as they did.

As our former Minister of Agriculture from the Green Party, Renate Künast, once said: ‘Farmers will be the oil barons of the future!’ She and her party pushed for massive subsidies for growing energy crops.

The destruction of nature by the land-hungry wind and biogas industries is the opposite of what the environmental movement used to fight for: just as the communists made workers unfree and poor, the Greens have destroyed our landscapes and killed millions of birds and bats.

In Germany, there are some very large solar power plants. A solar farm covering 48 hectares with shiny metallic panels is located in the hills of the Franconia region. The local chapter of the Green Party had a problem with this, because the solar farm is located in a nature reserve. But the politicians in the Green Party agreed to the construction of the plant because to them, saving the global climate was more important than saving nature in the region.

But it is the wind industry that has the strongest impact on the German landscape. And not just on the landscape, but on wildlife as well. Germany is not a country with many endemic species, unlike Indonesia or Brazil. So the extermination of a species in Germany does not usually mean they will disappear from the Earth, as appears likely for the Sumatran rhino. That’s the good news.

But there are exceptions. The most famous of them is the red kite. More than half of the global population of red kites breeds in Germany, a total of about 15,000 pairs. One of the leading ornithologists in the country, Oliver Krüger, says ‘it does not look good for the red kite’. He also says, ‘we have a special responsibility for the red kite’.

The shot that marked the beginning of the red kite’s downfall was fired on 1 January 1991. It was fired by the German environment minister at the time, Klaus Töpfer, a member of the Christian Democratic Party. 1991 was when renewable energy feed-in tariffs came into effect, later enshrined in the renewable energy law, usually referred to using its German acronym, EEG.

The law guaranteed that, from 1991 on, anyone who invested in wind power or biogas plants would receive a highly subsidized price for their electricity for 20 years. The law set off the most dramatic changes in the German landscape since World War Two – slowly at first, then very noticeably, and finally faster and faster. Today about 28,000 wind turbines defile the face of Germany, from the North Sea to the Alps, from the Black Forest to Berlin.

Because politicians and investors want to avoid long legal battles with local communities and residents, they are planning to site more and more of their large wind farms in forests. In Baden Württemberg, in southwestern Germany, where the famous Black Forest is located, the state environment minister, Franz Untersteller, announced that ‘we are going to build wind parks in forest areas far away from residential buildings.’

1200 turbines have now been constructed in forests. The newer turbine models, such as the ‘Enercon E126’, are 200 m high, with a rotor diameter of 127 m. To build one of these towers, more than 5000 m2 of forest must be cleared.

If investors from any other industry had scarred natural areas and remote forests in this way, there would have been a political scandal. In the meantime, however, politicians of all parties are working to weaken German conservation laws, in order to allow wind and solar farms to be built in every last unspoilt corner of Germany.

Wind power has an enormous need for space. For example, to replace a single coal-fired power station, such as the Moorburg power plant in Hamburg, the entire area of the city-state would have to be covered with turbines.

An even more land-hungry form of energy is the cultivation of maize for biogas plants. Maize monocultures totaling 2.5 million hectares dominate the landscape in many German regions today. This is an area the size of Sicily. According to Torsten Reinwald from the German Hunting Association, ‘the past 30 years have seen a 22- fold increase in the area under maize cultivation’.

This mass of maize is not only used for biogas production, but for animal feed as well. But energy crops alone are using 1.5 million hectares of land. No hamsters, hares, butterflies or wild bees can survive in the barren ecological desert of a maize field. Field larks no longer sing, lapwings no longer call. Buntings, quail and wagtails all disappear. Partridges were once the typical inhabitants of the German agricultural landscape, a common sight on Sunday afternoon walks. Since the 1980s, their population has collapsed by 94%. Other bird species typical of agricultural areas have seen declines of between 20 and 50% over the past 20 years.

‘The bitter truth is that we cannot yet demonstrate an impact of climate change on biodiversity, but the effects of climate and energy policy have been dramatic’, says Martin Flade, an ornithologist and the publisher of Die Vogelwelt, Germany’s leading magazine on ornithology and birding.

He says that ‘the main problem in nature and species protection is the intensity of agriculture’. While there used to be more fallow land than land used for maize, now it’s the other way around. Flade says that ‘this has an immediate effect on the population of breeding birds’. Today, the ratio of maize area to fallow land is 20 to 1.

In 2013, Flade received the annual award of the German Ornithological Society for his work. In the award statement, the society said: ‘As a result of the rash and hasty expansion of renewable energy from agricultural biomass and wind power, the populations of almost 50% of all bird species have significantly decreased’.

But it’s not just birds that are affected. So are fish. There are 9000 biogas plants in Germany, which are regularly subject to breakdowns. In some of these cases, toxic slurry has spilt into streams, poisoning the water for many kilometers downstream. The result has been the mass killing of trout and other freshwater fish. Whole populations have been extinguished. Unlike other toxic spills, none of these incidents are systematically recorded.

On top of all this, it’s not even certain that growing plants for energy creates any benefit for the climate at all. The biologist Josef Reichholf says that the energy used to create the fuel is much higher than the energy contained in the fuel itself. Only with massive amounts of fertilizer can a maize seed grow into a plant, 3 m tall, in just a few months. That fertilizer is usually liquid manure. The energy and carbon dioxide balance for biofuels does not take this fertilizer into account.

The destruction of rain forest in South America also isn’t included in the balance. Brazil and other countries in South America grow the soy used to feed the livestock that produce the manure.

Unlike an oil spill or an accident at a chemicals plant, the expansion of maize farming and the wind industry does not happen suddenly, but stretches out over years. That’s why most people do not notice the ecological disaster unfolding around them. Nevertheless, the impact of these changes is much greater than that of any single sudden disaster, because the changes take place almost everywhere, and cover very wide areas.

Most German states want to reserve 2% of their land area for wind power. That doesn’t sound like much, but the figure of 2% only refers to land covered by the rotor blades. The area in which birds are affected will be many times larger. According to the government bird protection observatories, there should be a 6-km buffer between a wind turbine and the nest of a lesser spotted eagle (a very rare species in Germany). In theory, not a single new wind turbine should therefore be built in the entire Vorpommern region in northern Germany, where many of these eagles breed.

But nevertheless they are being built: Building on 2% of Vorpommern would therefore be an appalling threat to the species: ‘Two percent of the area can destroy 100 percent of our landscapes’, says Harry Neumann, president of the Nature Conservation Initiative.

The ornithologist Klaus Richarz was commissioned by the German Wildlife Foundation to examine the effect of wind power in forest habitats. For 22 years, Richarz headed a Bird Protection Observatory covering three German states. His study proves that we have an urgent problem. The rotor blades of a wind turbine have a radius as long as a football field and rotate at 300 km/h.

Against these huge propeller walls, red kites and other birds don’t stand a chance. The rotor blades hit large birds, such as storks, raptors and ducks, particularly often. ‘Birds of prey’, says Professor Oliver Krüger, ‘are relatively rare, need large areas, but collide disproportionately often.’

The problem is getting accurate numbers, since foxes, rats, wild boars and other scavengers remove the bird corpses at night. However, it is estimated that 12,000 birds of prey are killed by wind farms every year. For the number of all birds killed by the German wind industry there is an extrapolation from Hermann Hötker, an ornithologist at German Foundation for Nature Conservation. He estimates that each turbine kills between one and five birds per year, meaning between 28,000 and 140,000 fatalities in total.

Wind power lobbyists say the numbers are small compared to the millions of birds that collide with windows, cars, power lines and other obstacles. But this is a fallacy, because the argument ignores which species are affected. If ten city pigeons fly into windows or cars, it has no effect on the population of pigeons. But when a breeding red kite is chopped up by a rotor blade, it represents a significant loss for the species in the region. If one red kite is caught in a rotor every eight years, then the 28,000 turbines in existence at present will kill 3500 birds. In a total population of only 15,000 breeding pairs in Germany, that’s a dramatic loss.

According to a 2013 study commissioned by the Brandenburg State Environment Office, rotor blades killed about 300 red kites each year in this one state alone. If the German climate protection plan is implemented as planned and the number of turbines is doubled, the red kite could soon be extinct in Germany.

The plan would mean one turbine every 2.7 km on average all over Germany, each one 200 m tall, without regard for landscapes, lakes, mountains, forests or cities. The PROGRESS study showed that even a widespread raptor like the common buzzard would be threatened if wind power is expanded as planned.

Birds that aren’t killed by the rotor blades are often driven away. One of these wind power refugees is the black stork, a very shy forest bird. When 170 turbines were installed in the Vogelsberg region in the state of Hesse, nine of the 14 pairs of black storks in the region simply disappeared. If the argument that windows and other obstacles kill even more birds is very misleading, when it comes to bats the argument is completely wrong.

Since bats use ultrasound to navigate, they almost never collide with any barriers. They can even fly through spinning rotor blades without getting hit. But even so, they fall dead from the sky. The cause is barotrauma: Their lungs burst because of the pressure drop behind the rotors. This happens to about 240,000 bats each year. The actual number is probably much higher, because they often fly a little longer before they die and their little cadavers are eaten.

Whenever there was a construction project in Germany such as a motorway, bridge, airport, office park or residential building, the presence of a bat colony could hold up the project in the courts for years, or prevent it altogether. Yet when the wind industry kills masses of these animals, there is no such outrage.

The supporters of the German energy transition brush aside all collateral damage to the environment, such as dead bats, with the argument that global climate disaster must be prevented. The Green ex-minister in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz, Evelin Lemke, justified the destruction of a forest by a wind farm in her state with the words: ‘Without protecting the climate, we will have no more biodiversity at all.’ Saving the world seems more important than the nature at our doorstep.

With wind power, solar farms and biogas, Germany is supposed to lower its carbon dioxide emissions and slow down global warming. But so far, this has turned out to be wishful thinking. Despite the rapid expansion of alternative energy and nearly e30 billion in subsidies every year via the feed-in tariff scheme, we are not seeing any reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. On the contrary, they have increased slightly, because Germany has switched off emissions-free nuclear power plants. And every time the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, the electricity companies have to fire up their coal power stations to prevent a blackout.

The more dubious our energy transition becomes, the more we find nature-loving people becoming active in the fight against landscape destruction and bird killing. There are already 1000 grassroots initiatives campaigning against wind power. Not everyone involved cares about protecting birds. Some are afraid that their homes will lose in value when they’re surrounded by gigantic rotors. But many no longer accept the destruction of our beautiful historic landscapes.

However, as this resistance grows stronger, the methods employed by wind power investors are becoming less savoury. Trees that contain the nests of protected birds – such as the red kite or lesser spotted eagle – are being cut down illegally. That’s because a new turbine would not be permitted near such a nest. Just look through German regional newspapers and you’ll examples of these crimes all over the country. Eight incidents were reported to the German Wildlife Foundation in only one year.

The reason of course is money. Lots of money. A lease payment from the owner of the turbine to the owner of the land could be as high as e80,000 every year for 20 years. (This money is ultimately paid by consumers via their electricity bills.) If a forest owner has land for ten turbines, they can receive a windfall of e16 million.

That kind of money leads to criminal actions. The German Wildlife Foundation has therefore proposed a policy that puts a ten-year ban on wind farm construction in areas where the nest of a raptor has been destroyed. A similar rule worked well in Sicily, where the mafia stopped burning forests after a law introduced a fifteen-year ban on construction after any forest fire.

The expansion of alternative energy is wreathed in a sense of urgency. In the face of all the frightening scenarios of future climate change, pointing out the environmental consequences of wind farms and biogas plants seems petty and secondary to most people, as if we wanted to stop the fire truck from coming to the rescue just to help a few wandering toads.

Yet with no other technology do Germans accept the destruction of nature as they do with wind power. If dead eagles and kites were found next to chemicals plants or nuclear power stations, the public reaction would be fierce and furious.

In 1962, the start of the environmental movement was marked by a book about birds of prey: Silent Spring, written by the American biologist Rachel Carson. She argued that the excessive use of certain pesticides had pushed America’s national bird, the bald eagle, to the brink of extinction. Despite this, in Germany today we are allowing the red kite to be destroyed by an industry that claims it is protecting the climate but in reality is merely promoting its own interests.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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How can so many people be so wrong?

There are quite a lot of authors who produce scientific articles in support of global warming. Yet they must know of the many holes in the theory. In particular, they must know how vanishingly small are the effects and changes that they document. They spend their lives studying and writing about minutiae. Some, such as the litigious Stefan Rahmstorf, even plumb the depths of absurdity by writing about temperature changes in thousandths of one degree Celsius. Why do they do it? What makes them think that the energies they put into their calculations are well deployed? Do they ever think that they are wasting their precious time?

I think I know the answers to that. For a start, it is not a conspiracy. It is however something nearly as powerful. It is an intellectual fashion. It is a testimony to the power of a bandwagon effect. People want to be "in" with the crowd. So their writing is largely a game. They want to show that they are doing significant and important work and joining in with what is currently accepted as wise is by far the easiest way to do that.

But that is only part of the story. Participation in a folly has to satisfy deeper psychological needs. And my background in psychological research exposed me to a quite extraordinary example of that. Let me tell the story of it:

Most psychologists are Leftists. And in the immediate aftermath of WWII that posed a big problem: In the context of his day, Hitler was a Leftist too. The name of his political party gave the first hint of that -- it was (translated) "The National Socialist German Worker's party" (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). Hitler's antisemitism was normal among the prewar Left and even his nationalism had a long history on the Left. None other than Joseph Stalin referred in his propaganda to his war with Germany as "The Great Patriotic war" (Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́). And Theodore Roosevelt, founder of America's "Progressive" party, did a pretty good line in conquering other countries -- with his involvement in taking over Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

And nationalism even lingered on for a while in the post-war American Left. JFK's "My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" was essentially what Hitler also preached to Germans.

Just to show that Hitler actually won his elections by socialist appeals, note one of his election posters below:



It translates as: The Marshall and the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights", which is very much what the American Left preached during the Cold War. Here's another one:



It translates as "With Hitler against the armaments madness of the world". Again that could have been a slogan of the American Left during the Cold War. The Left to this day criticizes military spending.

So there you have the very great and embarrassing problem that faced the American Left after 1945. They somehow had to dissociate themselves from the reviled Hitler. He had actually put their ideas into practice. Ideally, they had to blame Hitler on conservatives, as unlikely as that was -- considering that the most relentless foe of Hitler had been the arch-Conservative Winston Churchill. But they accomplished their task. To most people today, Hitler is known as "right wing".

So you can see where I am going here. The big lie that Hitler was a "Rightist" shows the way for the big lie of global warming.

How did the Left do it? With the complicity of the whole American Left, including the media. With so many people preaching the lie, it became accepted as fact. In truth, Hitler was to the right of Russia only, in that he was less destructive of the existing society. But that shred of truth was focused on. The American Left as a whole adopted the Soviet "line".

But psychologists helped too. They were overwhelmingly Leftist so had a vested interest in the lie too. They became the equivalent of today's global warming scientific establishment. They in fact went to work straight after the war to work on the lie. The fruit of their labours emerged in 1950, in the form of a book under the lead authorship of Marxist theoretician Theodor Adorno: A book called "The authoritarian personality". The book claimed that American conservatives were authoritarian, just like Hitler and that authoritarianism was not a political system but rather a form of personality maladjustment. They might not be politically the same but Hitler and American conservatives were psychologically the same.

They made those claims while the greatest authoritarian regime of C20 loomed over the world of politics: The Soviet Union. The Soviets were unmistakably Leftists but they were allegedly not authoritarians at the personality level. They were just noble idealists who accepted that "To make an omelette, you have got to crack eggs".

It was all immensely implausible but the story was greeted with glad cries by virtually all psychologists. The individual liberty orientation of conservatives was held to flow from a love of authority. Black might as well have been white.

There were of course many attacks on such an absurd theory and every aspect of it eventually wound up on the wrong side of the research evidence. The first half of Altemeyer's 1986 book gives a good run-down of all the critiques concerned.

But the critiques and refutations were like water off a duck's back. They were ignored just as critiques of global warming are now mostly ignored.

And although it must hold the records for the most refuted theory in psychology, it still seems to be accepted by most psychologists today. Uncritical mentions of it continue to emerge.

So you can see that if a theory SUITS people's needs it will be accepted regardless of the evidence. People believe what they want to believe. And that is what is happening with global warming. It gives people a feeling of significance and even heroism. What achievement can beat "Saving the planet"? Intellectual fads and fashions are one thing but nothing beats saving the planet. So the theory has to be saved too. And that is what the climate scientists are doing when they write in support of global warming. They are desperately trying to save a wonderful theory -- a theory which gives all sorts of psychological rewards. So the tiniest scrap of apparently supportive evidence is seized upon and publicized.

That is what we read in mainstream climate science today.

REFERENCES

Adorno T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik E., Levinson D. J. and Sanford R. N. (1950) The Authoritarian Personality. Harper, New York.

Altemeyer R. A. (1981) Right-wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg.




Switching over to an all-electric car fleet would create a huge demand for rare resources and require a huge expansion of mining

But the Green/Left HATE mining

The global embrace of electric cars is being hailed by myriad enthusiasts as yet another kind of digital disruption coming out of Silicon Valley. But if that transformation comes to pass, what it would actually signal is a new era of mega mineral mining and chemical processing — and rising American import dependencies.

Batteries are, after all, not digital but chemical machines. Given the scale of global transportation, using electricity as the primary fuel for personal mobility would mean fabricating gigatons of batteries. And that, in turn, would require mining astounding quantities of minerals and processing a virtual sea of chemicals.

But when it comes to betting on the future of anything, whether you're a stock picker or policy planner, which are you more bullish on: the future of chemicals and mining, or computing and machine learning? The question answers itself, except apparently for electric-car boosters. You could call that the real Tesla effect.

This is no knock on Tesla, which has gone in just five years from zero to selling more cars in America in the $100,000+ category than Mercedes-Benz. That unprecedented achievement, aided by the aura of CEO Elon Musk, has made Tesla the icon of the electric-car future, animating enthusiasm in ways no government program or lobbying could ever have achieved.

There are now more than 100 different models of EVs in the pipelines of the world's automakers, not counting China.

This flood of potential EVs has not only generated a lot of competition for money-burning Tesla stock, it has so emboldened bureaucratic aspirations that outright bans on the sale of internal combustion engines are now on the table, notably in Germany, France, England, China and, predictably, the state of California.

Green lobbyists are advising investors to get ahead of the inevitable and sell stocks in oil companies before the collapse in demand.

And policymakers are similarly being warned that the end of the petroleum age is in sight and they should assume a future of declining tax and royalty revenues from the oil sector.

Here's the problem: While electricity is invisible and weightless compared with gasoline, batteries and the materials required to build them are not.

Holding the energy value of 300 pounds of oil (that's one barrel) requires about 20,000 pounds of batteries and far more weight — often 10- to even 100-fold more — in minerals dug out of the earth in order to produce materials to fabricate them, commodities such as lithium, copper, nickel, manganese, rare earths and cobalt.

In an all-EV future, global mining would have to expand by more than 200% for copper and by at least 500% for minerals like lithium, graphite, and rare earths, and far more than that for cobalt.

An EV requires at least 2,000 times more weight in cobalt than a smartphone. Even the modestly aspirational goals for EVs will require cobalt production to rise far more than even the most optimistic forecasts for expansion of that mining sector. To paraphrase, there will be digging.

Fortunes stand to be made by companies and countries able and willing to dig up and process so much of the earth. Analysts, including those at the Motley Fool, have been assiduously charting the little-known mining and chemical stocks that would benefit.

Most are foreign, and many are Chinese. Given the reflexive regulatory and environmentalist hostility to mining, this means the EV path also promises greater import dependencies for America than we've ever seen with petroleum.

At the center of the EV supply chain are countries such as Chile, Argentina, Australia, Russia, Congo … and China. Notably, China refines 40% of all cobalt today.  In a sign of the times, China Molybdenum recently bought, for $2.7 billion, a major Congolese cobalt mine.  It's China Sinochem that's rumored to be bidding $4 billion to buy a big stake in Chile's SQM, one of the world's biggest lithium mines.

Meanwhile, China already dominates global battery manufacturing, and is on track to supply nearly two-thirds of all production by 2020.

There is indisputably "gold in them thar hills" for commodities traders, brave investors and Chinese exporters, should the subsidies for EVs expand. But it won't actually make much difference to global oil dependency. Do the math.

The International Energy Agency's most optimistic forecast puts the world EV fleet rising from today's 2 million to 200 million by 2030, which translates into about 15% of all cars by that date. That share, in turn, means displacing about 7% of world oil demand because light vehicles use about half of all oil. (The rest is for trucks, aircraft, chemicals, etc.)

That 7%, as they say, is not nothing. But it's hardly an existential threat to oil producers in a world where petroleum demand has been rising for thirty years, and has actually accelerated over the past five.

Battery chemistry isn't upending energy markets in any time frame that's meaningful. But it would certainly upend global mining and ignite geopolitical tensions.

Meanwhile, the real energy disruption on the horizon is happening in the oilfields with the rise of all things digital: the industrial Internet of Things, machine learning, analytics and automation.  It's a classic example of a revolution hidden in plain sight.

A conga line of consultancies and banks have published reports about the emerging digital oilfield revolution: Citi, BCG, Accenture, McKinsey, Deloitte, KPMG and Goldman Sachs.

The potential to more broadly employ software is also clearly on the radar of both legacy oil majors as well as the hundreds of smaller shale companies. The latter were responsible for the shale revolution coming out of left field to double America's oil production in a half-dozen years. Imagine what happens when digital fuel is added to that fire.

It's unclear who will come to dominate the real digital energy revolution. A decade or two ago it was also unclear which companies would eventually sit atop the digital landscape in media, mail, advertising and entertainment.

In hindsight, we know that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon each acquired about 100 companies along the way to dominance. Odds are the same pattern emerges in digital-industrial domains.

Even the green-leaning World Economic Forum sees "digitalization" bringing over $1 trillion of value to global oil and gas companies and, at the same time, nearly that much value again for consumers.

Meanwhile, the EV future will require trillions of dollars in value-destroying subsidies, never mind how many backhoes are put to work digging up the earth. Which future would you bet on — or prefer — given such stark economic asymmetry

SOURCE





Ending the War on American Energy

The Trump administration just proposed the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history

For decades, many American leaders have talked about energy independence. The Trump administration actually takes this commitment seriously. Last week, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced his department’s proposal for the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. Known as the Proposed Lease Sale 250, the Department of the Interior will be offering leases totaling 76.9 million acres. The lease locations span the federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the unleased areas of the Gulf of Mexico’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), as well as offshore locations in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The sale will be held and livestreamed from New Orleans in March of 2018.

Proposed Lease Sale 250 will not only create jobs for Gulf Coast states, but it also enhances our national security position. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2016, the U.S. net imports on petroleum accounted for about 25% of all petroleum consumption (about 10.1 million barrels per day (MMb/d)). Roughly 70 countries supply our imports, with Canada, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia being the top five.

Petroleum and petroleum products include crude oil, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, asphalt, biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) and others. Our importing not only means that the U.S. economy supports off-shore jobs rather than American jobs, but it presents a significant strategic hurdle in our foreign policy. The U.S. dependence on foreign oil places us in a strategically vulnerable position where we must rely on another country (often those who do not share our interests) to fuel our cars, boats, planes and military equipment. Energy independence means that we gain self-sufficiency, and do not have to play political games with oil-supplying countries who use their energy supply as a way to manipulate our geopolitical position and our loyalties.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates that the development of the lease sites could be between .21 and 1.12 billion barrels of oil and breaks through barriers that have prevented job growth and expansion in the energy industry. A recent report by the Department of the Interior outlines the many burdens and barriers to energy growth in the U.S. including slow permitting processes and redundant regulations. Vincent De Vito, counselor to the secretary for energy policy, stated, “The federal government can and must be a better business partner. … The recent actions outlined in this energy report show how interior is rolling back some of these burdensome regulations that add little or no value, while promoting responsible energy development.”

The sale excludes whole and partial blocks of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, and other blocks due to congressional moratoriums and other statutes. According to the statement from the Department of the Interior, “In addition to the high bids and rental payments, the Department will receive royalty payments on any future production from these leases. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) lease revenues are directed to the U.S. Treasury, Gulf Coast states, the Land and Water Conservation Fund and Historic Preservation Fund.” This means a great increase in funding for the federal government, Gulf Coast state governments and funds committed to preservation and conservation.

Proposed Lease Sale 250 also creates a stability and certainty regarding the future of the energy sector. Congressman Rob Bishop, chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, observes, “If we are serious about energy dominance and long-term energy affordability, we must create certainty about future access in the Outer Continental Shelf.”

Under Barack Obama, 94% of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) was prohibited from leasing. In May, Secretary Zinke issued Secretarial Order 3350, which began a five-year program to help develop the OCS. Uncertainty regarding lease availability, permitting and regulations has adversely affected the American energy industry. Companies don’t want to risk their business if the government decides to fine them for “new rules” or close their drilling area. With an administration that has their back, American energy producers can face the future with certainty and optimism.

Optimism, in fact, has been a huge factor in the revitalization of the economy since Trump’s inauguration, and, according to Investor’s Business Daily, stronger optimism and factory output has greatly increased.

Why?

Business is based on the principle of optimistic risk in which business owners risk their money and resources hoping for a reward. Take, for example, the lemonade stand. You invest money to buy the lemons and sugar. You invest money in marketing (signs made from posters and markers). You invest time to sit outside and advertise your product, hoping that the combination of a good location (corner lot), supply (you were the first one out there) and the hot weather (demand) will mean that you will have customers. You price each cup so that you can make a profit. In total, you risk the investment in the lemonade stand for the reward of people purchasing your lemonade. This is basic business.

Now imagine that you invested all this money into your lemonade stand with the projected profit of a certain amount. Then the government comes in unannounced and says, “You need a permit. That will cost $50. You can only sell lemonade on this block, in the middle and not the corner lot. You can only sell three cups per hour. You can’t use real sugar, you need to use alternative sugar (that has a bad aftertaste).” Then they create additional rules without warning and fine you for non-compliance. Now that the government has reshuffled your deck, you must deal with multiple variables and things just became uncertain. This is called business uncertainty.

Under the previous administration, energy and other industries endured multiple aspects of uncertainty including unpredictable rules and regulations, which stifled productivity, optimism and business confidence. Now, with Proposed Lease Sale 250, and an administration committed to removing burdens and regulations, the business landscape for American energy has begun to change.

As Senator Bill Cassidy notes, “President Trump and his administration are following through on their promise to end the war on American energy,” which ultimately means a big win for American industry, the American worker and the American geopolitical position.

SOURCE




If Industry-Funded Scientists Can Be Conflicted, Surely Government-Funded Scientists Can Be Too

Scott Pruitt blocks EPA-funded researchers from serving on the agency's advisory boards

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt has
declared that researchers who receive funding from his agency cannot serve on its scientific advisory committees. "It is very, very important to ensure independence, to ensure that we're getting advice and counsel independent of the EPA," Pruitt told reporters Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.

Nearly 10 years ago, I researched the issue of research conflicts of interest for the American Council on Science and Health. My report concluded that

there is very little evidence that alleged conflicts of interests are significantly distorting scientific research, harming consumers and patients or misleading public policy. Most conflicts of interest activists clearly have prior strong ideological commitments against markets and corporations. They view the conflicts of interest campaign as another tool to attack an enterprise which they already despise on other grounds.

Interestingly, in my review of the voluminous conflicts-of-interest literature 10 years ago, I could find no published studies that even attempted to see whether government funding might skew research results in the direction favored by the agency that supported such research.

If there are any such studies out there, please direct my attention toward them now. The topic is certainly worth addressing. As the economists William N. Butos and Thomas J. McQuade argued in 2005,

Scientists' success in securing funding testifies to their submission of proposals that receive a favorable hearing by the funding agencies. Thus, scientists have an incentive to develop and nurture professional relationships with agency members, advisors, and consultants. Finally, government funding of science, including that associated with military R&D, unavoidably establishes linkages between the funding agencies' preferences (or legislative charge) and the scientific activity that university and industry researchers perform. These linkages relate to the purposes for which funds are made available, thereby affecting the direction and regulation of scientific research as well as specific protocols for military R&D.

In a column published just when the anti-fracking hysteria was peaking, I asked, "Is Regulatory Science an Oxymoron?" At the conclusion I posed a couple of questions:

Why is it that environmentalists and environmental agency bureaucrats can always gin up studies that show that any activity they oppose and/or want to regulate is dangerous to the environment? On the other hand, why is it that energy producers and energy agency bureaucrats can gin up studies that suggest that the benefits of any activity they favor outweigh the costs?

My tentative answer: Regulatory science is an oxymoron.

In any case, the foregoing is not meant endorse any of the candidates nominated by Pruitt to serve on the EPA's scientific advisory board. Each will need a case-by-case evaluation; avoiding both government shills and industry shills is a good idea. But Pruitt's ruling that researchers dependent on agency funding should not serve on EPA advisory committees is not self-evidently wrong.

SOURCE




Avalanche of global warming propaganda about to hit

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference starting on Monday in Bonn, Germany, we need to brace ourselves for an avalanche of global warming propaganda. We’ll be told that extreme weather, sea level rise, and shrinking sea ice are all about to get much worse if we do not quickly phase out our use of fossil fuels.

What will make this session especially intense is that this year’s meeting is being presided over by Fiji, a government that has taken the climate change alarm to extremes.

Conference president Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama calls for “an absolute dedication to meet the 1.5-degree target,” the most stringent goal suggested by the Paris Agreement. In support of Bainimarama’s position, the COP23/Fiji Website repeatedly cites the frightening forecasts of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stating, for example, “The IPCC recently reported that temperatures will significantly increase in the Sahel and Southern African regions, rainfall will significantly decrease, and tropical storms will become more frequent and intense, with a projected 20 per cent increase in cyclone activity.”

To make such dire forecasts, the IPCC relies on computerized models built on data and formulae to represent atmospheric conditions. Besides the fact that we lack a comprehensive ‘theory of climate,’ and so do not have valid formulae to properly represent how the atmosphere functions, we also lack the data to properly understand what weather was like over most of the planet even in the recent past. And, without a good understanding of past weather conditions, we have no way to know the history of its average condition—the climate. Meaningful forecasts of future climate change are therefore impossible.

An important data set used by the computer models cited by the IPCC is the ‘HadCRUT4’ global average temperature history for the past 167 years produced by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and the Hadley Centre, both based in the United Kingdom.

Until the 1960s, HadCRUT4 temperature data was collected using mercury thermometers located at weather stations situated mostly in the United States, Japan, the UK, and eastern Australia. Most of the rest of the planet had very few temperature sensing stations. And none of the Earth’s oceans, which cover 70% of the planet, had more than the occasional station separated from its neighbor by thousands of kilometers.

The data collected at weather stations in this sparse grid had, at best, an accuracy of +/-0.5 degrees Celsius, often times no better than +/-1 degree. Averaging such poor data in an attempt to determine global conditions cannot yield anything meaningful.

Modern weather station surface temperature data is now collected using precision thermocouples. But, starting in the 1970s, less and less ground surface temperature data was used for plots such as HadCRUT4. This was done initially because governments believed that satellite monitoring could take over from most of the ground surface data collection. But the satellites did not show the warming forecast by computer models. So, bureaucrats closed most of the colder rural surface temperature sensing stations, thereby yielding the warming desired for political purposes.

Today, there is virtually no data for approximately 85% of the Earth’s surface. Indeed, there are fewer weather stations in operation now than there were in 1960.

So, the HadCRUT4 and other surface temperature computations after about 1980 are meaningless. Combining this with the problems with the early data, and the fact that we have almost no long-term data above the surface, the conclusion is unavoidable: it is not possible to know how the Earth’s climate has varied over the past century and a half. The data is therefore useless for input to the computer models that form the basis of the IPCC’s conclusions.

In fact, there is insufficient data of any kind—temperature, land and sea ice, glaciers, sea level, extreme weather, ocean pH, etc.—to be able to determine how today’s climate differs from the past. So, the IPCC’s climate forecasts have no connection with the real world.

This will not stop Bainimarama and other conference leaders from citing the IPCC in support of their warnings of future climate catastrophe. No one should take them seriously.

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.  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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The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change

By Dr Nick Watts and uncle Tom Cobleigh and all

This article is a real hoot.  The direct effects of the tiny upwards movement in temperatures in recent decades have to be equally tiny and hence probably below the level of detection.  So the article excerpted below focuses on extreme weather events, which Lancet asserts are warming-related and more frequent.  But even that dubious strategy is disappointing to them.  Note the highlighted (red) clause in the excerpt below. The allegedly more frequent events have NOT caused more frequent deaths.  The health effects of extreme events are NIL!

So the whole article boils down to a parade of things that SHOULD affect health but don't. What a laugh!

And claiming that warming is bad for you is crazy anyway.  Winter is the time of increased deaths.  Warming would alleviate that.  Lancet has long been politicized and their claim that George Bush killed 655,000 Iraqi civilians shows how far they stray from what they know. But in this issue they have reduced themselves to absurdity.  Global warming theory clearly rots the brain

Lancet seems to hope that an impression of "consensus" will make up for their lack of facts and logic. The number of co-authors they have listed for their article must be some sort of record.  They truly are "uncle Tom Cobleigh and all"


The Lancet Countdown tracks progress on health and climate change and provides an independent assessment of the health effects of climate change, the implementation of the Paris Agreement,1 and the health implications of these actions. It follows on from the work of the 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change,2 which concluded that anthropogenic climate change threatens to undermine the past 50 years of gains in public health, and conversely, that a comprehensive response to climate change could be “the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century”.

The evidence is clear that exposure to more frequent and intense heatwaves is increasing, with an estimated 125 million additional vulnerable adults exposed to heatwaves between 2000 and 2016 (Indicator 1.2). During this time, increasing ambient temperatures have resulted in an estimated reduction of 5·3% in outdoor manual labour productivity worldwide (Indicator 1.3). As a whole, the frequency of weather-related disasters has increased by 46% since 2000, with no clear upward or downward trend in the lethality of these extreme events (Indicator 1.4), potentially suggesting the beginning of an adaptive response to climate change. Yet the impacts of climate change are projected to worsen with time, and current levels of adaptation will become insufficient in the future.

Additionally, in the longer term, altered climatic conditions are contributing to growing vectorial capacity for the transmission of dengue fever by Aedes aegypti, reflecting an estimated 9·4% increase since 1950 (Indicator 1.6).

SOURCE




Stanford Prof sues scientists who criticized him – demands $10M

Another example of a decayed Warmist brain

Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson has filed a lawsuit, demanding $10 million in damages, against the peer-reviewed scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) [link to published paper] and a group of eminent scientists (Clack et al.) for their study showing that Jacobson made improper assumptions in order to claim that he had demonstrated U.S. energy could be provided exclusively by renewable energy, primarily wind, water, and solar.

A copy of Jacobson’s complaint and submitted exhibits can be found here and here.

What Jacobson has done is unprecedented. Scientific disagreements must be decided not in court but rather through the scientific process. We urge Stanford University, Stanford Alumni, and everyone who loves science and free speech to denounce this lawsuit.

The lawsuit rests on the claim that Clack et al. defamed Jacobson by calling his assumption that hydroelectricity could be significantly expanded a “modeling error.”

Environmental Progress weighed in on this controversy when Clack et al. published their article. In our view, it’s clear that Jacobson made a false assumption about the possibility of expanding U.S. hydroelectricity.

Jacobson’s assumption speaks to the essential fallacy of the 100 percent renewables proposal.

Renewables like solar and wind require vastly larger amounts of land and mining in order to produce power that is unreliable. Under the guise of protecting the environment, renewables destroy the environment.

One of the most environmentally devastating ways of producing electricity is with hydroelectric dams. While poor nations have a right to make cheap power from hydroelectricity, their environmental impact is enormous.

Jacobson’s proposal is to expand radically hydroelectric dams so they can support unreliable solar and wind energy. Such a proposal would devastate fish species even more than they have already been devastated.

The only way to promote such an environmentally devastating agenda is to claim it is good for the environment. That requires lying. Now that these lies have been exposed, it is revealing that Jacobson has resorted to a lawsuit that cannot and will not do anything more than intimidate his opponents.

Scientists and energy analysts should not be intimidated. We must stand up to bullies. We urge all lovers of nature and science to join us in denouncing this unprecedented and appalling attack on free inquiry.

SOURCE




The Media’s Reaction After Trump’s EPA Chief Cites Bible To Justify Agency Changes

Reporters spun themselves in knots after Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt used a biblical analogy to explain his recent decision to change how the agency’s science advisory panel is staffed.

Any academic who receives EPA grant money can no longer serve as an adviser on the Scientific Advisory Board, among other boards, Pruitt said at a press conference Tuesday. Yet reporters honed in on his decision to use a Bible quote suggesting that people can’t serve two masters.

“Joshua says to the people of Israel: choose this day whom you are going to serve,” Pruitt said, referring to scientists who accept government grants while also using an advisory position to give independent advice.

“This is sort of like the Joshua principle,” he said. “You are going to have to choose either service on the committee to provide counsel to us in an independent fashion or chose the grant. But you can’t do both. That’s the fair and great thing to do.”

New York Times reporter Lisa Friedman suggested on social media that the analogy was an example of Pruitt’s supposed messianic ambitions.

“I think Pruitt just likened himself to Joshua leading the Israelites to the Promised Land by ending ability of EPA advisers to get grants,” Friedman tweeted shortly after the agency chief made his comments.


“Scott Pruitt Is Using the Bible as His Guide for Reorganizing EPA’s Science Board,” liberal media outlet Mother Jones wrote in a headline addressing the topic. The outlet’s writer, Rebecca Leber, implied the so-called Joshua principle was now the new guiding metric for Pruitt and the EPA.

Pruitt, who sued the agency a dozen times during his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general, said the board will be made up of environmentalists, industry groups, academics and other experts to provide a diverse perspective on EPA science policy. The agency has more than 20 boards, but his directive only applies to Scientific Advisory Board, the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee (CASAC) and the Board of Scientific Counselors.

Members of the three targeted committees got $77 million in EPA grants during the last three years. Conservative groups found CASAC members have gotten $192 million in EPA grants since 2000, an amount they say claim makes it difficult to maintain an air of independence.

Pruitt also put a big emphasis on “geographical diversity” in appointing science advisers.  Science boards have typically left out experts from large swaths of the country, especially western states that feel most of the brunt of clean air rules, EPA officials said.

Republicans have worked for years on separating the committees from grants. The House passed a bill in March, for instance, that would prevent scientists currently receiving EPA grants from serving on EPA advisory committees. The bill is stuck in the Senate.

SOURCE




Reality vs. Theory: Scientists Affirm ‘Recent Lack Of Any Detectable Acceleration’ In Sea Level Rise

According to peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science, anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the cause of Arctic sea ice decline.  In fact, peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science indicates the causal relationship is so direct and so linear that it can be said with confidence that we humans melt one square foot of sea ice for every 75 miles we travel in a gasoline-powered engine.

The modeled results are even more alarming for the polar ice sheets.   Like Arctic sea ice, the peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science says that there is a direct, causal relationship between the magnitude of our CO2 emissions and the magnitude of polar ice sheet melt.   Therefore, by driving our vehicles and heating our homes we are catastrophically melting the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets to such a degree that our CO2 emissions will likely cause sea levels to rise 10 feet during the next 50 years (by 2065).

Ten feet is the equivalent of about 3.05 meters of sea level rise by 2065.

So, according to peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science, the catastrophic melting of the polar ice sheets will produce 0.61 of a meter of sea level rise per decade, which is 61 mm/year, over the course of the next 50 (now 48 – a 2015 paper) years.  To achieve this, more than an order of magnitude greater sea level rise acceleration will need to begin . . . immediately.

The trouble is, the physics, and reality, do not support “mainstream” climate science models predicated on anthropogenic CO2 emissions as the principal driver of  ice sheet melt and sea level rise.  For example:

1. East Antarctica, which comprises two-thirds of the continent, has been gaining mass since 2003 (Martín-Español et al., 2017).

2. The Western Antarctic Peninsula has been rapidly cooling since 1999 (-0.47°C per decade), reversing the previous warming trend and leading to “a shift to surface mass gains of the peripheral glacier” (Oliva et al., 2017).

3. The Greenland ice sheet (GIS) has been melting so slowly and so negligibly in recent decades that the entire ice sheet’s total contribution to global sea level rise was a mere 0.39 of a centimeter (0.17 to 0.61 cm) between 1993 and 2010 (Leeson et al, 2017) .  That’s a sea level rise contribution of about 0.23 mm/year since the 1990s, which is a canyon-sized divergence from the 61 mm/year that adherents of peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science have projected for the coming decades.

And now Australian scientists have published a new paper in the journal Earth Systems and Environment that “does not support the notion of rapidly changing mass of ice in Greenland and Antarctica“.  The paper highlights the “loud divergence between sea level reality” and “the climate models [that] predict an accelerated sea-level rise driven by the anthropogenic CO2 emission“.

In fact, the key finding from the paper is that long-term observations from tide gauges reveal a “recent lack of any detectable acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise“.    The modern rate of sea level rise acceleration – 0.002 mm/year² – is so negligible it falls well below the threshold of measurement accuracy.

The lack of a detectable global-scale sea level rise acceleration recorded in tide gauge measurements isn’t a novel finding.  In recent years, dozens of other scientists have bravely come forward to challenge “consensus” modeling that implicates anthropogenic CO2 emissions as the preeminent cause of ice sheet melt and sea level rise.

Perhaps at some point “consensus”-based climate science will jettison its focus on models and projections of perilous future climate states directly caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions and instead embrace the observational evidence that may undermine the alarm.

Until then, we will likely need to continue learning about how many millimeters we humans raise sea levels for each kilometer we drive in our fossil-fuel-powered vehicles.   Because that’s how “consensus” climate science works.

More HERE



More evidence thast the medieval warm period was widespread

The MWP is too well documented for Warmists to deny it.  Instead they claim it was a "local" effect of the North Atlantic region. But it has in fact been documented in many places worldwide.  Below is the latest such

Warming and Cooling: The Medieval Climate Anomaly in Africa and Arabia

Sebastian Lüning et al.

Abstract

The Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) is a well-recognized climate perturbation in many parts of the world, with a core period of 1000-1200 AD. Here we present a palaeotemperature synthesis for the MCA in Africa and Arabia, based on 44 published localities. The data sets have been thoroughly correlated and the MCA trends palaeoclimatologically mapped. The vast majority of available Afro-Arabian onshore sites suggest a warm MCA, with the exception of the southern Levant where the MCA appears to have been cold. MCA cooling has also been documented in many segments of the circum Africa-Arabian upwelling systems, as a result of changes in the wind systems which were leading to an intensification of cold water upwelling. Offshore cores from outside upwelling systems mostly show warm MCA conditions. The most likely key drivers of the observed medieval climate change are solar forcing and ocean cycles. Conspicuous cold spikes during the earliest and latest MCA may help to discriminate between solar (Oort Minimum) and ocean cycle (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, AMO) influence. Compared to its large share of nearly one quarter of the world's land mass, data from Africa and Arabia are significantly underrepresented in global temperature reconstructions of the past 2000 years. Onshore data are still absent for most regions in Africa and Arabia, except for regional data clusters in Morocco, South Africa, the East African Rift and the Levant coast. In order to reconstruct land palaeotemperatures more robustly over Africa and Arabia, a systematic research program is needed.

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.  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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Q: What nation on Earth has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other?

Inconvenient Answer: According to climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels, it’s “the good old USA, and that’s because we’ve been substituting natural gas for coal for power generation”. CO2 emissions from electric power generation in the US last year were the lowest in 28 years, going all the way back to 1988. How often is that reported in the media?

Dr. Patrick Michaels explains how the free market is allowing natural gas to be substituted for coal  worldwide at a rate that will achieve a lower level of global warming than would occur with strict adherence to the regulations of the Paris Accords.

SOURCE



Warmist admits it is all political





Ten free-market groups advise Trump to reject solar tariffs

A group of 10 conservative groups are lobbying the White House to make sure President Trump rejects a proposal to place tariffs on solar panel imports.

"If trade restrictions are imposed, the cost of solar products in the United States could double, endangering tens of thousands of good-paying domestic jobs within the solar industry," the conservative groups said in a letter sent to the president Thursday night.

The tariffs "would amount to nothing more than a crony capitalist giveaway to failing foreign-owned companies," the letter said. "They would be paid for by crippling an otherwise growing domestic solar industry (one whose preferential federal tax treatment has been correspondingly phasing down) and higher prices for energy consumers."

The International Trade Commission had unanimously decided last month that the solar industry is being hurt by cheap solar panel imports, which set the stage for Trump to impose tariffs that falls under the the president's authority. Trump could make a decision soon.

The coalition, including the R Street Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Competitive Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, National Taxpayers Union, and others, point out to the president why approving tariffs would be an inappropriate move.

They also pointed out that there is precedent for not taking action, saying tariffs to help the steel industry that were put in place under former Republican President George W. Bush were harmful.

"The last time the United States imposed import restrictions under its safeguard power was in 2002, when then-President George W. Bush tried to implement stiffer tariffs on imported steel," the letter said. "The tariffs sparked a threat of retaliation by the European Union, caused up to 200,000 domestic job losses and nearly $4 billion in lost wages, and eventually were withdrawn after a successful challenge at the [World Trade Organization]."

The two companies that want the tariffs imposed, majority Chinese-owned Suniva and Germany's SolarWorld, are "both bankrupt, foreign-owned solar firms" that filed a petition under Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974, "claiming that an increase in solar imports has seriously injured them."

The conservative groups said the "rarely used but powerful statute" under Section 201, if approved, would apply to otherwise “fairly traded” products from all countries and companies that export to the U.S.

"In short, it’s an extreme remedy with a troubling recent history," the letter stated.

"While granting these companies import relief may preserve a minimal amount of jobs in their companies, tariffs or other trade restrictions would no doubt jeopardize far more domestic jobs than could possibly be saved," the coalition stated.

"In fact, it is questionable whether the petitioners’ requested relief would revive their companies at all."

SOURCE




British Industry Faces Green Energy Cost Crisis – And That Is Set To Grow

Behind the political battles over household bills lurks a far greater energy cost crisis. It risks damaging British industry and undermining attempts to boost productivity after Brexit.

Households are paying more for clean power than they should, but official data shows UK bills are still below average compared to the EU.

The picture is more worrying for industrial and commercial customers. In this league table UK businesses pay well above the average. The cost burden they bear is second only to Denmark.

The issue is under discussion at the Treasury. Officials are clear that for the UK to attract inward investment the country needs to be competitive on energy costs, even while taking action to reduce carbon emissions.

“This is why the Government has commissioned an independent review into the cost of energy led by Prof Dieter Helm … to deliver the Government’s carbon targets and ensure security of supply at minimum cost to both industry and domestic consumers,” the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said earlier this year.

The Helm review concluded that bungled policymaking and Governmental tinkering has meant the UK is paying “significantly” more than it should.

Andrew Buckley, a director at the Major Energy Users Council (MEUC), agrees. “The report refers to decarbonisation and social policies making up 20pc of bills,” he says.

“For our members we calculate that these costs will reach over 40pc by 2020 and this is the main reason why our industrial power bills are the amongst the most expensive in Europe.”

The Government has already been forced to provide an 85pc rebate on green energy taxes for UK steel makers. The £5m a month refund is meant to help avoid another crisis for the embattled industry. Energy costs remain a threat to other high-energy industries, however. Water companies are some of the highest energy users in the country, alongside factories and the data centres run by some of the biggest tech and telecoms giants

“Some energy intensive businesses receive some relief from these charges but the great majority of commercial and industrial companies amongst MEUC membership do not,” Buckley says. It comes at a time of paramount importance for the economy as Britain prepares to leave the European Union. At the same time the cost of importing parts is rising and attracting skilled labour is becoming more difficult.

Today, an annual electricity bill for one of Britain’s top 10 highest energy users stands at around £120m a year, but within a few years this will rise to £170m.

If Helm had his way, all the costs of subsidising Britain’s low carbon power projects – such as wind, solar and new nuclear plants – would be scrapped from industrial bills altogether.

SOURCE




Australian CO2 emissions to 'far exceed' 2030 Paris pledge

Good news for Australians

National pledges to cut carbon emissions fall well short of what's needed to avoid dangerous climate change, with Australia likely to miss its 2030 commitment by a wide margin, a United Nations body said.

The UN Environment Program's Emissions Gap 2017 report found pledges to cut pollution made at the Paris climate summit two years ago are only about one-third of what's needed to be on a "least-cost pathway" to stopping the worst effects of climate change.

The target is to stop global average temperatures from rising 2 degrees or more above pre-industrial levels. Change on that scale is expected to cause major droughts, food shortages and damaging sea level rise.

The emissions gap to keep with a 1.5-degree goal is 16-19 gigatonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent, while the 2-degree target would need an extra 11.13.5 gigatonnes of CO₂-e of cuts by 2030 to be attained, the report said.

Sea levels could rise 1.3 metres by 2100 if coal use continues
"There is an urgent need for accelerated short-term action and enhanced longer-term national ambition, if the goals of the Paris Agreement are to remain achievable," the report said.

The positive news is that global emissions have largely flatlined for the past three years, thanks in large part to a plateauing in China. Still, other potent greenhouse gases such as methane are rising, and carbon dioxide emissions could accelerate if global economic growth picks up.

Frank Jotzo, a professor at the Australian National University's Crawford School and a contributor to the report, said tumbling costs of renewable energy and other low-carbon technologies suggest nations could increase their emissions cuts "and it won't be terribly hard".

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.  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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Atmospheric CO2 levels hit a record high in 2016: UN warns increase could fuel a 20 metre rise in sea levels and add 3°C to global temperatures

This is just publicity seeking -- but as long as the papers keep printing it, some galoot will keep churning it out and enjoy seeing his name in the papers.

It's not even news. CO2 levels have been edging up for many years but there has been no concomitant rises in temperature.  From 1945 to 1975 there was a temperature plateau yet CO2 levels rose sharply at that time.  CO2 levels do NOT drive temperatures up

And the article below generalizes from just ONE YEAR! That is a travesty of science.  You can't extract generalizations from one instance! But if you are going to be that fine-grained, why not mention  that for part of 2016, CO2 levels went down to 401ppm -- or mention that in 2017 levels went as high as 409 ppm before dropping back to 403ppm?  Clearly CO2 levels are rising but in an erratic and unpredictable way that makes absurd any dependence on one year for significance.

The Mauna Loa CO2 record from Dec 15 to date is below. Column 4 is the average.



Note that the high average is mainly the product of some high levels in the middle of the year.  There were also some rather low levels. And the December 2016 figure was only a little above the January figure.

Note however that these are total CO2 levels in the atmosphere, not just human emissions of CO2.  Human emissions did not rise in 2016.  So the rise observed was NOT due to human activities.  It was the product of natural factors.  The pretence below that that humans were responsible for the rise and are therefore to blame for something is plainly a bare-faced FRAUD.  The 2016 figures are in fact good evidence that CO2 levels can rise regardless of what humans do.  They tell us NOTHING about human activity

And what's this nonsense abut melting ice?  96% of the world's glacial ice is in the Antarctic and that is GROWING, not melting.  It also averages about 30 degrees below zero so a global temperature rise of 2 degrees would melt it only at the extreme margins, if at all.  Do I have to mention that the melting point of ice is zero degrees?


The amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere grew at a record rate in 2016 to a level not seen for millions of years, the United Nations has revealed.

This increase could fuel a staggering 20-metre rise in sea levels and add 3°C to temperatures.

Experts hope the findings will encourage environment ministers around the world to work on new guidelines for the Paris climate accord.

KEY FINDINGS

- Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 hit 403.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2016, up from 400.0 in 2015

- That growth rate was 50 per cent faster than the average over the past decade, driving CO2 levels 45 per cent above pre-industrial levels and further outside the range of 180-280 ppm seen in recent cycles of ice ages and warmer periods

- The last time carbon dioxide levels reached 400 ppm was three to five million years ago, in the mid-Pliocene era

- This increase potentially fuelled a staggering 20-metre rise in sea levels and added 3°C to temperatures

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the main man-made greenhouse gas, hit 403.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2016, up from 400.0 in 2015, the UN World Meteorological Organisation said in its annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

That growth rate was 50 per cent faster than the average over the past decade, driving CO2 levels 45 per cent above pre-industrial levels and further outside the range of 180-280 ppm seen in recent cycles of ice ages and warmer periods.

The WMO said: 'Today's CO2 concentration of ~400 ppm exceeds the natural variability seen over hundreds of thousands of years.'

The latest data adds to the urgency of a meeting in Bonn next month, when environment ministers from around the world will work on guidelines for the Paris climate accord backed by 195 countries in 2015.

The agreement is already under pressure because US President Donald Trump has said he plans to pull the US out of the deal, which seeks to limit the rise in temperatures to 'well below' 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial times.

Human CO2 emissions from sources such as coal, oil, cement and deforestation reached a record in 2016, and the El Niño weather pattern gave CO2 levels a further boost, the WMO said.

Professor Piers Forster, Director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds, said: 'These large increase show it is more important than ever to reduce our emissions to zero - and as soon as possible.

'If vegetation can no longer help out absorbing our emissions in these hot years we could be in trouble.'

SOURCE




Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations At 400 PPM Are Still Dangerously Low For Life On Earth

With atmospheric CO2 concentrations reaching the 400 ppm level, the media and a number of alarmist scientists have set off the mega-alarm bells, claiming “record high levels” of CO2 had been reached, and that the planet is on the verge of an overdose. This is based purely on ignorance of the Earth’s history.

Worrying that 400 ppm is too high is like worrying about your fuel tank overflowing when it reaches the 1/8 mark during filling.

From a historical perspective, an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 400 ppm is actually almost scraping the bottom of the barrel. Over the Earth’s history, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have ranged from 180 ppm to 7000 ppm. On that scale we are in fact today barely above the Earth’s record lows.

That 400 ppm is actually dangerously low is a fact the alarmists keep avoiding and suppressing. Below 150 ppm, plant-life dies off on a massive scale. The Earth actually came very close to that point many times over the last 2 million years during the ice ages. At the bottom of the last ice age just 20,000 years ago, life on the planet literally teetered on the brink when CO2 fell to a level of just 180 ppm. Do we really want to live on the brink of extinction?

It’s a fact that biologists have shown that once the atmospheric CO2 level falls below the 500 ppm level, plants really begin to suffer. Many of us have seen the video showing how plants grow faster under higher CO2 concentrations.

Note that at high CO2 concentrations, such as 800 ppm, plants thrive. But as CO2 levels fall off, growth rates really start to plummet once they fall below 500 ppm. History shows that the Earth sustains much more life, i.e. is much greener and fruitful, when CO2 levels are higher, i.e. in the vicinity of 1000 ppm.

No one disputes that man’s activities have helped to increase atmospheric CO2 concentration, and it should not be in dispute that plants and life on the planet are thankful that man has done so. At 400 ppm, the planet is a safer place to be and will be even safer at 1000 ppm.

SOURCE




Elevated CO2 and Ozone Improve the Growth of Japanese Cedar Trees
 
Paper Reviewed:  Hiraoka, Y., Mine Nose, T.I., Tobita, H., Yazaki, K., Watanabe, A., Fujisawa, Y. and Kitao, M. 2017. "Species characteristics and intraspecific variation in growth and photosynthesis of Cryptomeria japonica under elevated O3 and CO2". Tree Physiology 37: 733-743.

Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) is a key silviculture species in Japan, making up approximately 44 percent of the country's plantation area. Given such prominence, Hiraoka et al. write that "in order to adapt to future environments, tree improvement programs will need to consider rising O3 and CO2 concentrations, as well as other changes in climate" that may occur. Therefore, as their contribution to this effort, the team of seven Japanese researchers investigated the individual and combined impacts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and ozone (O3) on the growth of Japanese cedar.

To accomplish their goal, they planted 1-year-old cuttings from twelve C. japonica clones in a free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE) facility at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute in Tsukuba, Japan. The trees were grown for two years under one of four treatment conditions during the growing season: (1) ambient air, (2) twice-ambient O3 (approximately +30 ppb), (3) elevated CO2 (~550 ppm during daylight hours) and (4) twice-ambient O3 and elevated CO2. During the experiment, as well as at its end, the scientists made a number of measurements to discern the impacts of the different treatments on the growth of the young trees.

Results of their analysis revealed that C. japonica had a low sensitivity to the negative (growth-retarding) effects of O3. In fact, as illustrated in the figure below, trees growing in the elevated O3 environment had higher plant dry mass than their ambient counterparts, though the difference were not statistically significant. With respect to elevated CO2, it induced a statistically significant increase in stem, shoot, root and total plant biomass (see figure below), the latter of which parameter increased by some 60 percent in response to a relatively small CO2 stimulation of approximately 175 ppm. Tree dry mass was also improved in the combined elevated O3 and elevated CO2 treatment, though not quite to the extent as it was in the CO2 treatment alone. Consequently, in light of all of the above, it would appear that Japanese cedar growth will experience enhancements in the years and decades to come as both the CO2 and O3 contents of the atmosphere increase. And that is great news for the silviculture industry in Japan.

SOURCE




Global Temperatures Continue To Drop Back To Pre-El-Nino Levels

The HadCRUT4.5 temperature anomaly for September calculated by spherical triangulation is 0.54C, a fall of 0.17C since August. Temperatures have seemingly returned to a long trend after the 2016 El Nino.



Monthly temperature anomalies for HadCRUT4.5 (HadSST3 and CRUTEM4.6 stations data) calculated by spherical triangulation method.

HadCRUT4 global temperature for September 2017 is 0.56 deg C — which is the same as the September temps in 2005 (0.57), 2009 (0.56), 2012 (0.55), and 2013 (0.54).

Source: Met Office, HadCrut4

SOURCE




Australians would rather have cheaper power bills than meet international climate change targets

More Australians would rather have cheaper power bills than meet international targets to reduce carbon emissions.

Almost one in two people surveyed by Newspoll agree with the idea of dumping global climate change agreements for less expensive electricity, with 45 per cent in favour compared to 40 per cent who oppose to the move.

The results, published in The Australian, come as U.S. President Donald Trump pulls out of the Paris accord on global warming which Australia continues to support.

One Nation voters, who support Pauline Hanson, were the most in favour of pulling out of international climate change agreements, with an overwhelming 70 per cent in favour of quitting the Paris accord.

A majority, or 54 per cent of Liberal and National party voters, also want Australia to relinquish global warming commitments.

However, voters on the left of politics want Australia to keep its commitment to climate change deals, with 50 per cent of Labor supporters opposed to pulling out, compared with 71 per cent of Greens voters.

Last year, Australia joined 174 other nations in formally signing up to the Paris accord, which commits our country to a 28 per cent reduction on 2005 emissions during the next 13 years.

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.  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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