Ten Practices Linking Environmentalism with Fascism

Recent news that the German Green Party is willing to work with the extreme right “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) in order to secure a vote to ban glyphosate has shocked many political actors seeking a cordon sanitaire around the German fascist party. The Risk-Monger though is not surprised. He has often used words like “undemocratic”, “Machiavellian” and “fascist” to describe the self-righteous environmental activist campaign strategies.

Contradictions for the Cause

The Greens are a party of inherent contradictions. They talk of democracy and the voice of the common person yet the consequences of their food and energy policies favour the elite and the privileged (at the expense of the poor). Greens will lead transparency campaigns and moves to expose corporate lobbying, and yet they themselves, as transparocrites, often do not disclose from whom and how they use their (public) funds.

They seek development and increased aid for emerging economies and yet they legislate to harm African agricultural and technological development. Environmentalists are quick to be righteous but unlike industry and government, do not adhere to ethical codes of conduct and even condone lying and breaking the law.

These contradictions are tolerated by the passion of the environmentalist ideology. Driven to change the world, the Greens have shown their Machiavellian stripes. The ends not only justify the means, it also allows these princes of purity to justify a whole heap of deception, intolerance and injustice (as the recent Portier Papers demonstrated).

So if activists like Corporate Europe Observatory’s Martin Pigeon will knowingly get in bed with slime-ball American predatory lawyers; USRTK’s Carey Gillam will happily take money from anti-vaccine nut-jobs; NGOs like Greenpeace openly justify lying; should we be surprised that the German Green Party has stripped themselves naked for the puerile pleasure a rag-tag band of neo-Nazis (I hope they used a condom!)?

I can understand how some nature-loving kittens may be offended with my comparing them to a political ideology responsible for millions of deaths, so perhaps some qualifications are in order. Fascism arises when someone is willing to do anything to achieve a set of goals – principles of decency, tolerance and propriety are secondary and expendable. Motivated by higher goals (nationalism, racial supremacy, purity), fascists execute this strategy with righteous, Machiavellian precision.

For environmentalists, if there is a means to succeed in saving the planet, that strategy is elevated above and beyond widely shared codes of conduct (sometimes crudely and condescendingly referred to as the values of the “sheeple”).

I have referred to this as zealot ethics but it is also a core fascist mindset: obsessive, blind righteousness! Green activists are essentially fascists who tolerate minorities! So for the German Green Party to work directly with a band of neo-Nazis is a no-brainer – they have so much in common. To achieve their goal, the German Greens merely will hold their nose and look the other way when their sister party, the AfD, starts attacking immigrants.

Ten Practices linking Environmentalism with Fascism

Not only do environmental activists, Green Party politicians and organic industry lobbyists engage in fascist practices, they also agree with many of the fascist ideologies. Here are ten practices that link environmentalism with fascism.
green fascists

1. Denying Dialogue

I have often criticised how environmental activists in Brussels have worked to block dialogue. Not just how they have organised events in the European Parliament or the Hague where they deny others the right to participate and engage, but how they actively work to exclude others, like industry representatives, from participating in public debates. Denying the process of open dialogue is something only fascist-minded individuals would support. Pro-organic activists have even shut down Facebook pages and blog-sites.

2. Argumentum ad hominem

Whenever people who do not know me accuse me of being all sorts of evil (because they disagree with me), I get an image in my head of an angry, clean-cut Hitler’s Youth child chanting verbiage at me. Environmentalists do not argue on the basis of facts, science or evidence; rather they attack individuals personally, often quite viciously, via ad hominem attacks. These bully tactics are aimed to intimidate individuals in a ruthless ostracism resembling how opponents were treated in 1930s Germany.

3. Green Goebbelesque Gurus

Rhetorical jingoism repeatedly communicated works well when ubiquitous. In the 1930s, Joseph Goebbels utilised an emerging communications technology, cinema, to manipulate perception and enhance public fears and prejudices against certain races and ideologies. As the technology was new, few were able to discern reality from propaganda.

Today we have the emerging social media communications technology, and there are dozens of Green Goebbelesque Gurus running around weaving green lies, repeated millions of times until their credibility is uncontested. I know it is a misquote, but “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed” works perfectly on social media. If you share the views of Stephanie Seneff or Vandana Shiva five million times, they might just start to sound less ridiculous.

Just imagine if Goebbels had opened a Facebook page for Herr Hitler …

4. Victim Opportunism

Never waste a good crisis. When Herschel Grynszpan allegedly assassinated German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, the Nazi pogrom strategy went into motion. If you can use a victim for your own gain, and exploit the reality to hype up fear, chances are, you would make a very good fascist! The greens have taken this victim abuse strategy to the next level – we are all victims of the evil chemical industry. When Carey Gillam scares you about trace levels of glyphosate in your blood, in your daughter’s blood, in everyone’s blood, she is strategically creating mobs of walking wounded to exploit. That twinkle in Carey’s eye is historically haunting.

5. Greenshirt Mob Mentality

It is no surprise to the Risk-Monger that discussions with activists usually turn quickly into verbally aggressive mob attacks that can become quite threatening. Scientists like Kevin Folta have received death threats by this band of organic storm-troopers. Now the German Agricultural Minister, Christian Schmidt, who voted in favour of glyphosate, is facing death threats, is under protection and has had to take down his social media pages. The mob wants his blood and it is likely Angela will comply.

Vulnerable, frightened people can easily be made to act irrationally when their passions have been stoked by merciless opportunists. We are now in Donation December – there is no telling how far the NGOs will go to whip up some outrage.

6. A Relentless Desire to Win at any Cost

In their relentless drive to change the world, activists don’t lose campaigns, but merely suffer temporary setbacks from which they regroup and fight even more ruthlessly. The loss of the glyphosate vote is the equivalent of a Beer Hall Putsch. Seeing the rhetoric and venom coming out of Green Party corridors, the desire to drive forward and ban glyphosate has grown stronger with their saucy outrage. Only a fascist would not accept the decision of a legal, regulatory process. Will they set fire to the Berlaymont?

7. The Charade of Democracy

Branding themselves as representatives of the people, greens are very good at pretending to be democratic. Whenever an activist presents a policy statement, it is always cleverly voiced in the “we”, pretending their 5-7% of the electorate is actually representing the interests of the 99%. A small part of the population actually eats organic food, but they want all of us to (even if it means creating global food insecurity and environmental destruction).

Or is it: Fascists vs Science?

When the glyphosate reauthorisation was passed, the activists screamed that it was undemocratic. First of all, facts and evidence don’t need to be democratic! If 95% of the population denies evolution, it does not mean creationism is correct. In any case, the 1.3 million signatories of the activists’ silly citizen’s initiative suggests they think their narrow-minded views take priority over the livelihoods of 12 million European farmers or hundreds of millions of European consumers. Why? Because they are the Übermensch. The Greens will fight on to ban glyphosate through other, non-democratic measures, accepting no compromise – this is “total war”.

8. Blut und Boden

The most frightening illustration of Green fascism has been this “blood and soil” approach to mobilise a form of puritan, organic Aryanism. Our food has been contaminated by the modern technologies of an externalised industrial exploiter and manipulator – the pesticides industry. The German Food and Agriculture minister from 1933, Walter Darré, proposed a back to basics, back to the land ideology, with a more traditionalist and conservationist (green) approach.

This “new nobility” conserving soil has been seamlessly adopted by today’s agroecologists. When organic industry spokespeople start salivating about peasant farmers and smallholders in Cuba or Africa feeding hungry western elitist consumers, my mind wanders to Darré’s colonisation for his new nobility.

9. Heimat.org: Back to Green Righteous Roots

There have been many academics who have linked today’s Greens to 1930s Nazi Party ideology: Anna Bramwell’s autobiography on Darré or Rupert Darwall’s recent book, Green Tyranny, come to mind, showing how green Nazi policies have endured until today. Not only were Darré’s dabbling in organic food and free-range livestock rearing celebrated in 1930s Germany, but Nazi’s also were known to promote homeopathy and other alternative medicines. As today, being righteous and being fascist were synonymous. Hitler wanted to ban smoking but apparently relented, needing his soldiers to be “battle ready”.

There is even research linking the founding of the German Green Party directly to former Nazis. I have to admit I felt uncomfortable reading an NGO’s criticism of the Risk-Monger suggesting there was something prima facie wrong with my being involved as a speaker at an event partly organised by an Israeli group. It suggests that the Green’s attitudes here are more than simply pro-Palestinian sentiments.

10. Monsanto: The Final Solution?

To mobilise the masses and keep the mob enraged, any good fascist knows the value of a scapegoat. Years of propaganda and lies, repeated with Goebbelian precision, has built up an irrational rage against Monsanto: the “New Jew” – that filthy, vilified parasite that must be exterminated. When I tried to attend the Monsanto Tribunal show trial last year, I was alarmed at the blood-thirstiness of the angry strategists (definitely not the warm tree-huggers from the hippie commune I had expected). The green final solution entails destroying all industry so that the masses may prosper.

An Extreme on all your Houses

The last year has seen the disconcerting rise of the extreme right in election battles across Europe from France to the Netherlands, from Germany to Austria. After almost a decade of economic austerity and recessions, it should not be a surprise that the European electorate has radicalised to the extremes.

But it is not just the far right that should concern us. As in the 1930s, the far left has also gained important ground, including being involved in governments in Austria, the Netherlands and perhaps Germany. With the ideological failure of Communism, the values of the extreme left today is more and more occupied by the Greens.

The distance on the political spectrum between the extreme left and the extreme right is not that far. Both sides are not very good democrats, deny open dialogue, are quite righteous and passionate in their ideologies, are Machiavellian in their political strategies and know how to mobilise their mobs via emerging communications tools. So it should surprise no one that the German Green Party is ready to get in bed with the neo-Nazis if it means allowing them to ban an efficient herbicide.


What surprises me is how so few people are outraged by the antics of these fascist environmentalists.

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Climate Scientists Harassing Women

Consensus climate scientists have long been personal and damning in their criticism of those who don’t agree with them. They’ve threatened physical violence (Ben Santer: “Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”). They of course use the epithet ‘denier’ specifically to associate opponents with those who deny the Holocaust occurred.

But when they talk about male scientists they are somewhat restrained. Here’s Michael Mann on Richard Lindzen, former Alfred P. Sloan professor at MIT, and one of the most famous skeptics: “So Richard Lindzen is a scientist from MIT who has expressed contrarian views about climate change.” When astrophysicist Ken Rice, a consensus defender writes of Roger Pielke Jr., who disputes some elements of the consenssus, he writes “Okay, I do think that trying to improve the climate debate is commendable, so kudos to Roger for at least trying. ”

But when Mann speaks of Judith Curry, another climate scientist who disagrees with some consensus positions, he says ‘she is a carnival barker in the circus of climate denial.’ This is somewhat odd, as Judith Curry has 224 scientific publications credited to her–Mann is calling her a denier of a science she is helping create. She is also dismissively referred to on blogs published by climate scientists as ‘Aunt Judy’ and much worse.

The same is true for scientists like Sally Baliunas, Jennifer Marohasy, even consensus female scientists like Tamsin Edwards (called a ‘careerist’ by Josh Halpern for not being critical enough of lukewarmers). While male scientists definitely get their share of criticism–even abuse–with females, the invective seems more personal.

Now it is the turn of Dr. Susan Crockford, who has been a zoologist for 35 years. Despite that, despite her PhD from the University of Victoria in Canada, despite over 30 scientific publications, she is now classed as a ‘denier.’

A paper published Nov. 29 in the American Institute of Biological Sciences journal ‘Bioscience’ bears the title ‘Internet Blogs, Polar Bears and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy’ calls Susan Crockford a denier. Their evidence is that other unidentified blogs that the paper’s authors call ‘denier’ blogs (without citing them, without showing what it is about those blogs that render them anathema) link to Dr. Crockford’s weblog.

Let’s be clear about this. Dr. Crockford does not deny climate change. She writes about polar bears and clears up some misconceptions being published about them. But because weblogs this paper’s authors don’t like link to Crockford, she is now labeled a ‘denialist.’ But again, the casual dismissal of her life’s work is more personal than professional. She is derided as someone who focused on dogs,with an inferred snigger.

This is actually a common Consensus tactic–when they cannot criticize the science, they go after the scientist. Or even the scientists’s fans… The truth about polar bears is that they have survived warmer periods than those predicted for us by the IPCC. Their numbers are increasing, not decreasing. And the biggest threat to polar bears are hunters–as many as 1,000 per year (out of a total population of about 30,000) are shot.

The paper flat out lies about Crockford’s publication record, saying “Notably, as of this writing, Crockford has neither conducted any original research nor published any articles in the peer-reviewed literature on polar bears.” Crockford’s publications are listed here and include papers published in Oxford, British Archaeological Reports, Canadian Journal of Zoology and International Journal of Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, among many others.

It is another attempt to delegitimize a respected and credentialed scientist, based not on what she writes, but on what others write about her.

The Consensus team is not shy about labeling, defaming and insulting those in opposition. But here we see once again that it is easier for them to do this with female opponents.

The paper’s authors are Jeffrey A. Harvey, Daphne van den Berg, Jacintha Ellers, Remko Kampen, Thomas W. Crowther, Peter Roessingh, Bart Verheggen, Rascha J. M. Nuijten, Eric Post, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ian Stirling, Meena Balgopal, Steven C. Amstrup, Michael E. Mann.

Michael Mann is famous–or infamous–as author of the Hockey Stick chart. But Jeffrey Harvey is not. Harvey is willing to defend Paul Ehrlich, who to my knowledge has never been right about anything, but is willing to throw fellow scientist Susan Crockford under the bus. Here’s Harvey defending Paul Ehrlich:

“Effectively, these scientists – experts with many hundreds of peer-reviewed articles amongst them and with many awards (e.g. Paul Ehrlich has been a past winner of the Crafoord Prize, an equivalent to the Nobel Prize in fields outside of that award) – have drawn conclusions that an ‘expert’ like Fuller disagrees with.”

Stefan Lewandowsky, famed for having retracted his flagship paper and moving out of the country to live down the shame of it, deserves little mention.

The central point emerging from their paper is unintentional on their part. Their opponents are eager to cite scientists in their arguments. Rather than denying science, they are eager consumers of it.

The central point of this post–that climate scientists are dismissive, personal and insulting, and more so when the subject of their disdain are female, is clear just from their quoted remarks.

On Judith Curry:

Bart Verheggen: “Her unfounded allegations are insulting for the whole profession. It increases the polarisation and doesn’t add to the building of bridges (perhaps a one-way bridge).”

Michael Tobis: “Anyone who thinks all is roses in the garden of science has to account for the rise of Dr Curry to a position of responsibility in academia. (Here I am on the sidelines and there sits Judith Curry on top of the heap.”

Michael Mann: “Pathetic #RichardHarris @NPR puffpiece glorifies #JudyCurry for purveying #climatechange distraction & confusion ”

Michael Tobis: “So has she lost touch, or has she never had much scientific insight to begin with? That’s the only question any of this burbling raises. … On the other hand, to be honest no paper of hers has ever come across my radar in anything I’ve investigated.”

“It’s as if she had heard of science but never seen it done.”

On Susan Crockford:

Richard Littlemore: “Has beens, also-rans, deniers-for-hire on retainer at “think tank”. The scientists, ranging from …a sessional lecturer on the evolution and history of the domestic dog (Susan Crockford), include no top climate scientists currently publishing in the peer-reviewed literature.”

At the end of the day, members of the Consensus will dismiss this blog post in the same way they dismiss Susan Crockford–not because of the accuracy of the quotes listed here, not because of the truth or falsity of its central point, but because of provenance. It is posted on a blog called Climate Scepticism and hence is beyond the Pale.

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Cobalt, the heart of darkness in the shiny electric car story

The electric car story continues to gather momentum, with even major oil companies scrambling to join the coming green energy revolution.

Royal Dutch Shell has just announced a partnership with leading automotive companies to install super-fast chargers on European highways.

But as ever more companies sign up to the bright, shiny electric vehicle (EV) future, there is rising concern about the heart of darkness in this new technology: You can't power an EV without a lithium-ion battery and, for now at least, you can't make a battery without using cobalt.

And most of the world's cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a country racked by political instability, legal opacity and, at its darkest, child labour in its mines.

This concentration of supply risk, both in terms of physical units and ethical sourcing, isn't going away any time soon and could even worsen.

The dark side

The DRC accounted for 66,000 tonnes of global mined cobalt production of 123,000 tonnes last year, according to the US Geological Survey.

That's the official sector. There is also an artisanal stream of production, some of it using child labour and some of it controlled by insurgent militias.

Quite how much cobalt this grey sector generates is the main "known unknown" in any analysis of world production.

But it is an undisputed fact that it has been seeping into the official supply chain for years.

Speaking at a London Metal Exchange (LME) seminar in October, Tony Southgate, head of cobalt marketing at Eurasian Resources Group, warned that "it's almost inevitable (...) there are mobile phones in this room" containing cobalt from child labour in the DRC.

The issue has moved to the top of the LME's own agenda after complaints that one of its registered brands, produced by China's Yantai Cash Industrial, could include metal sourced from the dark side of the DRC cobalt sector.

The LME has written to producers asking for assurances on ethical and socially responsible minerals sourcing, while Yantai told the Financial Times that it is conducting its own due diligence exercise.

Legal opacity

Child labour is only one of multiple problems posed by the DRC to the emergence of an efficient raw materials chain for commodities used in batteries.

The legal and financial framework around the country's mining sector is both opaque and tinged with political interference.

A recent study by US advocacy group The Carter Center described state mining company Gecamines as operating a "parallel state" and concluded that $US750 million ($943 million) from DRC's copper mine privatisation process cannot be tracked reliably.

Such allegations are vehemently denied by the DRC government, but legal controversy is never too far away in the DRC mining sector.

Glencore, one of the leading operators in the country, has been sucked into a controversy surrounding the role of Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler in the acquisition of assets now operated by its Katanga Mining subsidiary.

Another operator, Groupe Forrest, is in legal dispute with Gecamines after the latter blocked access to its production site this year and awarded mining rights to another entity, Bloomberg reported.

This particular three-way court tussle is having a direct market impact because production at the site has been halted, taking about 5,000 tonnes of cobalt out of the supply equation this year.

Frankly, if the rest of the world could, it would happily not source any cobalt from the DRC.

And the likes of Tesla and Apple are trying to do just that, working with potential future producers in Canada and the United States to create their own cobalt supply chains.

There is no shortage of junior miner contestants in this ethical cobalt beauty contest, but right now the DRC is the dominant producer. And it's going to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Six of the top 10 cobalt-producing assets last year were located in the DRC, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

In 2022 the number will rise to nine out of the top 10, it forecasts. ("Cobalt - Supercharged as supply chain risk increases")

Quite simply, unless someone works out how to engineer cobalt out of the lithium-ion battery, the world is going to need a lot more cobalt and it's still going to get most of it from the DRC.

Dangerous dependency

This is a dangerously concentrated dependency, leaving a whole supply chain beholden to the political, legal and ethical uncertainties surrounding the DRC's mining sector.

The only comparison, S&P Global suggests, is a similar concentration of platinum production in South Africa.

When that country was roiled by a wave of industrial action in 2014, it translated into a 20 per cent dent in global supply that year. At least there were above-ground platinum stocks to fill the supply gap.

Whether there would be sufficient inventory of cobalt to buffer the market against serious disruption in the DRC is a very moot point.

The arrival of automotive companies to this dysfunctional market could in theory be a game-changer if they stimulate more supply and force a collective industry move to responsible sourcing.

A template already exists in a programme aimed at improving transparency in the tin-tantalum-tungsten mining sector of central Africa, including particularly challenging operating environments such as Kivu Province in the DRC.

Right now, however, a company such as Volkswagen is still at the early stage of simply trying to secure enough units to deliver on its electrification promise.

Attempts to lock in future supply at prices below current levels have not yet yielded any tangible results.

VW and other automakers are learning, to quote Rebecca Gordon, head of technology metals at CRU, "the value of cobalt in the ground".

Investing at the mine site would be one way of simultaneously ensuring supply in outright tonnage terms and in socially acceptable terms.

Most car companies are still understandably wary of getting involved at such an upstream part of a supply chain.

But if they don't, they will remain exposed to whatever happens in the heart of darkness that is the DRC.

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Twilight of the Climate Change Movement

Don’t be fooled by the post-Paris fanfare: The climate change movement faces big trouble ahead.

The UN’s climate summit in Paris at the end of 2015 concluded with a bang. The world’s governments promised sweeping cuts in carbon emissions. Rich countries promised to help poor ones with $100 billion per year in climate assistance. President Obama quickly declared the agreement “the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.” The consensus quickly jelled that this was a major, historic achievement.

Then came the fizzle: The agreement is non-binding. Secretary of State John Kerry asserted on NBC’s Meet the Press that compliance would be enforced through the “powerful weapon” of public shaming, apparently implying a policy of verbal confrontation toward states that fall short. The Danish scientist Bjørn Lomborg, a prominent critic of the top-down international conference approach to climate change, called the Paris agreement the “costliest in history” if implemented. According to Lomborg, the agreement would “reduce temperatures by 2100 by just 0.05 degrees Celsius (0.09 degrees Fahrenheit)…. This is simply cynical political theater, meant to convince us that our leaders are taking serious action…a phenomenally expensive but almost empty gesture.” NASA scientist Jim Hansen, one of the earliest proponents of the idea that global warming is manmade, slammed the deal as “half-assed and half-baked,” a “fake,” and a “fraud.”

Hansen’s assessment is probably close to the mark—and he and his fellow alarmists have only themselves to blame. While those who flatly deny the possibility of any global warming can be readily brushed aside, the alarmists have been much too quick to dismiss legitimate questions about precisely what the evidence shows. Indeed, they have frequently treated such questions as heresies to be persecuted, adopting an even more virulently anti-scientific mindset than the one they accuse others of.

Meanwhile, on the policy side, the alarmists’ call for worldwide economic controls, including caps on fossil fuels, are largely recycled from previous scientific doomsday fads, such as the oil scarcity scare of the late 1970s. Despite the enormous costs these policies would impose, especially on poor countries, they would do virtually nothing to stop anthropogenic climate change, let alone protect anyone from relentless natural climate change that is one of our planet’s most prominent and inescapable features. They are also distracting attention both from investments that would make society less vulnerable to climate change, and from a more pressing crisis, namely the extinction of a large fraction of the world’s plant and animal species due to widespread modification of natural habitat.

Don’t be fooled by the fanfare in Paris: The climate change movement faces big trouble ahead. Its principal propositions contain two major fallacies that can only become more glaring with time. First, in stark contrast to popular belief and to the public statements of government officials and many scientists, the science on which the dire predictions of manmade climate change is based is nowhere near the level of understanding or certainty that popular discourse commonly ascribes to it. Second, and relatedly, the movement’s embrace of an absolute form of the precautionary principle distorts rational cost-benefit analysis, or throws it out the window altogether.

As the costs of decarbonization start to hit home, and the public demands greater certainty about the benefits to be gained, the public—and particularly those industries that are hardest hit—will invest in scientific research, in the hopes of achieving a more granular cost-benefit analysis. Something similar is happening to proposed listings under the Endangered Species Act—where major economic interests are threatened, they have responded with enormous investments in scientific research in order to show either that the species in question is not in danger, or that it can be protected by measures far short of the often draconian prohibitions imposed pursuant to the Act.

These factors will almost certainly produce a more nuanced and less messianic view of the climate problem, with solutions aimed to maximize “bang for the buck” at the margins, where climate threats are most grave, rather than reordering human society in order to “save” a planet that, in the grand scheme of things, is quite indifferent to the state of the climate at any given time.

All sides of the climate change debate have a huge incentive to generate more and better climate science: the alarmists and their more skeptical colleagues all want to prove their points. As our scientific understanding improves, many of the propositions we hear today will have to be modified, and many will be refuted, as has always happened in the history of science. The scientific community may at times be powerfully resistant to revision of its received wisdoms; it took an entire generation for medical professionals to accept the germ theory of disease, despite the fact that the evidence in its favor generated by Pasteur and Koch was clear from the start. But better science wins out in the end.

The greater clarity that better science will bring will open up new opportunities to solve environmental problems both known and unknown, and not a moment too soon. The human race faces challenges that cannot effectively be met at a local or even a national level. These challenges will not be met by a wholesale reordering of human society from the top down, as many of the more authoritarian-minded environmentalists wish. Any attempt to impose command-economy solutions on a global scale will fall far short or outright fail, as the Paris agreement and its precursors show. The right strategy for confronting environmental challenges will have to be based on rational market incentives, rational cost-benefit analysis, and a broad-based consensus about the vital importance of efficient markets. Strategies that distort rational cost-benefit analysis (or the science on which it is based) to suit an anti-market agenda will not work and can only maintain the illusion of legitimacy for so long before they are discredited.

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West Australian rivers losing climate change battle

This is utter rubbish.  Rainfall in WA is notoriously variable, with many long dryish periods and some periods of flooding.  Rainfall has in fact been quite good in recent years, thus raising the average for recent years.  To compare that recent average with current falls tells us nothing.  Note below no comparison with the long term average


Rivers in the southwest region of WA are struggling to cope with the impact of climate change despite average winter rainfalls returning to the area.

A good dose of winter rainfall has failed to save rivers in WA's South West region from the impact of climate change, the state's water minister says.

Despite improvements in overall rainfall, most rivers recorded below average flows compared to the period from 1975 to 2016, according to the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation.

It comes as winter this year was WA's hottest on record, with average winter rainfall the 11th-lowest since 1900 when records began.

Gingin Brook in Perth's north continues to be one of the areas most affected by climate change, Water Minister Dave Kelly said on Monday.

Unusually heavy rainfall in February, combined with last year's winter rains, has given a short-term boost to Perth's main groundwater supply, which is currently at levels not seen since 2009.

Known as the Gnangara groundwater system, it supplies around 40 per cent of Perth's drinking water each year.

Mr Kelly said the February rainfall was another example of climate change where more extreme and unusual weather is predicted.

"River flows are one of the best indicators for measuring the effects of reduced rainfall," he said.

"What this year shows is there is no escaping the impact of climate change, which is not only reducing flow to our water supply dams but to our rivers as well."

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The catastrophe continues

Or it would if CO2 had any significant effect on temperature.  Until someone can show that it does, all the theorizing below can be ignored.  It is just Warmist theology

Scientists increasingly agree that it might be impossible to cap global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels—without first overshooting it and then using technology to siphon carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, causing temperatures to fall again.

In other words, global temperatures could continue to rise without any clear stopping point, and policymakers could still claim that they will be brought back within acceptable limits eventually. Without clearly outlined rules and action plans for overshoot scenarios, there's no exact definition of what constitutes a failure to meet global climate goals—which makes it harder to plan for the type of action needed for success, they argue.

Although rarely mentioned by policymakers, "negative emissions" technology—the idea of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air to bring global temperatures down—is essentially built into the models that scientists use to explore different climate scenarios. Meeting a 1.5-degree temperature target almost certainly relies on it, even with aggressive emissions reduction efforts starting now. And many modeling scenarios assume that a 2-degree threshold may require negative emissions, although it might be possible to reach that goal with heavy-handed mitigation efforts.

A major problem is that the technology isn't developed enough to be useful on a global scale. In fact, scientists disagree on exactly what methods could be used. Some have suggested a future in which machines are used to chemically scrub carbon dioxide out of the sky. But while some projects have demonstrated this type of technology on a small scale, it's nowhere near ready to be deployed at the levels required.

Other experts have proposed combining bioenergy with carbon capture and storage technology, an approach nicknamed "BECCS." Under this strategy, trees would soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow and then be harvested for fuel. The bioenergy power plants they feed would be equipped with carbon-capturing technology to trap the emissions.

Even this approach may have its shortcomings. Multiple studies in the last year or two have indicated that it's not feasible to grow enough trees, even on plantations. In one such paper, published earlier this year in Science, the authors recommend that scientists and policymakers seriously manage their expectations about negative emissions and avoid "cavalier assumptions of future technological breakthroughs."

Developing negative emissions technology to the point that it's actually capable of meeting global climate goals is essential for temperature overshoot scenarios to be considered viable. But in their new paper, Geden and Lِschel say policymakers generally "refrain from any political commitment to developing and deploying negative emissions technologies" at the scale needed for success.

And the lack of urgency may be tied to the fact that there are no clearly defined goals for when or how the technology should be deployed. What is the last year by which global temperatures should be back below a 1.5- or 2-degree threshold? How acceptable is it to overshoot either goal?

Setting these limits is essential, not just for developing negative emission technologies, but for motivating political action in the first place, Geden and Lِschel say. "Otherwise, climate policymakers, and even more so other branches of governments, could easily miss the urgent need for drastic mitigation, because they are under the impression that even inadequate action will never result in political failure," they write.

Geden and Lِschel point to several clear parameters for overshoot scenarios, including setting a date for temperature stabilization at the end of the century: "If targets agreed upon in 2015 cannot be met by 2100 then it should be called failure," they write. And they also say that future reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should exclude any overshoot scenarios associated with the 2-degree threshold, another effort at keeping global climate goals strict and their required action clearly defined.

Still, there are plenty of other concerns about overshoot scenarios, even with their limits clearly outlined. Both the 1.5- and 2-degree goals were established to avoid triggering catastrophic climate effects in the future. But Geden and Lِschel point out that it's "unclear what the overshoot effects would be on issues such as sea-level rise, ice-sheet loss or thawing permafrost, and whether such impacts might be reversible when global mean surface temperature falls below the threshold again."

And they're not the only ones to caution against potential unintended consequences of overshoot scenarios. Other scientists have warned about the dangers of assuming that negative emissions will solve the climate problem.

In a paper published last year in Science, climate experts Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research and Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom warn, "If we rely on these [technologies] and they are not deployed or are unsuccessful at removing CO2 from the atmosphere at the levels assumed, society will be locked into a high-temperature pathway."

Instead, they say, policymakers should proceed with their climate mitigation efforts as though negative emissions technology will fail. Then, if it proves useful in the future, it will only add to an already aggressive global climate action plan.
The same spirit of caution is presented in this week's comment. Overshoot scenarios may be a useful way of looking at the global climate problem if their limitations are understood, the authors suggest. That could prevent global climate targets from becoming "mere benchmarks that can be crossed for extended periods of time."

SOURCE






14 Climate Bullies Attack Susan Crockford For Telling The Truth About Polar Bears

Consensus climate scientists have long been personal and damning in their criticism of those who don’t agree with them. They’ve threatened physical violence (Ben Santer: “Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”). They of course use the epithet ‘denier’ specifically to associate opponents with those who deny the Holocaust occurred.

But when they talk about male scientists they are somewhat restrained. Here’s Michael Mann on Richard Lindzen, former Alfred P. Sloan professor at MIT, and one of the most famous skeptics: “So Richard Lindzen is a scientist from MIT who has expressed contrarian views about climate change.” When astrophysicist Ken Rice, a consensus defender writes of Roger Pielke Jr., who disputes some elements of the consenssus, he writes “Okay, I do think that trying to improve the climate debate is commendable, so kudos to Roger for at least trying. ”

But when Mann speaks of Judith Curry, another climate scientist who disagrees with some consensus positions, he says ‘she is a carnival barker in the circus of climate denial.’ This is somewhat odd, as Judith Curry has 224 scientific publications credited to her – Mann is calling her a denier of a science she is helping create. She is also dismissively referred to on blogs published by climate scientists as ‘Aunt Judy’ and much worse.

The same is true for scientists like Sally Baliunas, Jennifer Marohasy, even consensus female scientists like Tamsin Edwards (called a ‘careerist’ by Josh Halpern for not being critical enough of lukewarmers). While male scientists definitely get their share of criticism–even abuse–with females, the invective seems more personal.

Now it is the turn of Dr. Susan Crockford, who has been a zoologist for 35 years. Despite that, despite her PhD from the University of Victoria in Canada, despite over 30 scientific publications, she is now classed as a ‘denier.’

A paper published Nov. 29 in the American Institute of Biological Sciences journal ‘Bioscience’ bears the title ‘Internet Blogs, Polar Bears and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy’ calls Susan Crockford a denier. Their evidence is that other unidentified blogs that the paper’s authors call ‘denier’ blogs (without citing them, without showing what it is about those blogs that render them anathema) link to Dr. Crockford’s weblog.

Let’s be clear about this. Dr. Crockford does not deny climate change. She writes about polar bears and clears up some misconceptions being published about them. But because weblogs this paper’s authors don’t like link to Crockford, she is now labeled a ‘denialist.’ But again, the casual dismissal of her life’s work is more personal than professional. She is derided as someone who focused on dogs,with an inferred snigger.

This is actually a common Consensus tactic–when they cannot criticize the science, they go after the scientist. Or even the scientists’s fans… The truth about polar bears is that they have survived warmer periods than those predicted for us by the IPCC. Their numbers are increasing, not decreasing. And the biggest threat to polar bears are hunters–as many as 1,000 per year (out of a total population of about 30,000) are shot.

The paper flat out lies about Crockford’s publication record, saying “Notably, as of this writing, Crockford has neither conducted any original research nor published any articles in the peer-reviewed literature on polar bears.” Crockford’s publications are listed here and include papers published in Oxford, British Archaeological Reports, Canadian Journal of Zoology and International Journal of Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, among many others.

It is another attempt to delegitimize a respected and credentialed scientist, based not on what she writes, but on what others write about her.

The Consensus team is not shy about labeling, defaming and insulting those in opposition. But here we see once again that it is easier for them to do this with female opponents.

The paper’s authors are Jeffrey A. Harvey, Daphne van den Berg, Jacintha Ellers, Remko Kampen, Thomas W. Crowther, Peter Roessingh, Bart Verheggen, Rascha J. M. Nuijten, Eric Post, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ian Stirling, Meena Balgopal, Steven C. Amstrup, Michael E. Mann.

Michael Mann is famous–or infamous–as author of the Hockey Stick chart. But Jeffrey Harvey is not. Harvey is willing to defend Paul Ehrlich, who to my knowledge has never been right about anything, but is willing to throw fellow scientist Susan Crockford under the bus. Here’s Harvey defending Paul Ehrlich:

“Effectively, these scientists – experts with many hundreds of peer-reviewed articles amongst them and with many awards (e.g. Paul Ehrlich has been a past winner of the Crafoord Prize, an equivalent to the Nobel Prize in fields outside of that award) – have drawn conclusions that an ‘expert’ like Fuller disagrees with.”

Stefan Lewandowsky, famed for having retracted his flagship paper and moving out of the country to live down the shame of it, deserves little mention.

The central point emerging from their paper is unintentional on their part. Their opponents are eager to cite scientists in their arguments. Rather than denying science, they are eager consumers of it. […]

On Susan Crockford:

Richard Littlemore: “Has beens, also-rans, deniers-for-hire on retainer at “think tank”. The scientists, ranging from …a sessional lecturer on the evolution and history of the domestic dog (Susan Crockford), include no top climate scientists currently publishing in the peer-reviewed literature.”

At the end of the day, members of the Consensus will dismiss this blog post in the same way they dismiss Susan Crockford–not because of the accuracy of the quotes listed here, not because of the truth or falsity of its central point, but because of provenance. It is posted on a blog called Climate Scepticism and hence is beyond the Pale.

The paper I am criticizing reminds me of several other junk science publications–‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature’ (Cook, Nuccitelli et al), ‘Expert Credibility in Climate Change,’Anderegg, Prall et al and literally anything written by the biggest charlatan in climate science, Stefan Lewandowsky (one of the authors of this paper as well).

The purpose of these papers is not to communicate. It is to excommunicate.

SOURCE




UN agency to Congress: Drop dead

IARC takes US money, manipulates studies, colludes with activists – and snubs Congress

Paul Driessen

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in France has received over $48 million from America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), to determine whether various chemicals cause cancer in humans. Of more than 900 chemicals it has reviewed, only one was ever found non-carcinogenic. The latest substance to face IARC scrutiny is glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUp.

Not surprisingly, the agency branded glyphosate carcinogenic. But this time evidence is surfacing of collusion with anti-chemical activist groups and class action lawyers, serious conflicts of interest involving a key IARC glyphosate reviewer, and IARC manipulation of scientific reports along with deliberate withholding of studies that concluded the chemical is safe, so that the agency could get a guilty verdict.

Despite this disturbing evidence, and demonstrable proof of the chemical’s safety, the European Union barely extended its authorization for glyphosate use, and then by just five years, instead of the usual 15.

The House of Representatives Science Committee is deeply concerned about this corruption of science, its potential impacts on US regulatory decisions, and the use of IARC rulings by predatory lawyers who are suing glyphosate manufacturers. It sent letters to Health and Human Services Secretary Eric Hargan (who oversees the NIH and its agencies) and IARC director Chris Wild. The letters “request” all relevant documents and the names of IARC-affiliated people who could testify at Committee oversight hearings.

Dr. Wild’s artful and legalistic response emphasized “scientific consensus” among all review panel members; said “deliberative” documents would not be made available; claimed there were no conflicts of interest among any IARC reviewers; said he and his staff would not be “pressured” by “vested interests,” the media or Congress; and said congressmen can come to France if they want answers to their questions.

In other words: Drop dead. Members of Congress who authorize taxpayer funding for IARC have no right to scrutinize its deliberations and decisions, to ensure sound science, transparency and accountability.

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world. It is vital to modern agriculture – and one of the most extensively tested chemicals in history: some 3,300 studies over four decades attest to its safety. Indeed, virtually every reputable regulatory agency and scientific body in the world has determined that it does not cause cancer – including the European Food Safety Authority, European Chemicals Agency, German Institute for Risk Assessment and US Environmental Protection Agency.

Only IARC says glyphosate causes cancer. To help it reach that conclusion, the agency employed the services of Italy’s Ramazzini Institute, which also concocted studies claiming cell phones and artificial sweeteners cause cancer. It relies on Ramazzini even though regulatory bodies in Europe, the United States and New Zealand have investigated and criticized Ramazzini’s sloppy, suspect pseudo-science.

Dr. Wild’s agency has also worked closely with Dr. Linda Birnbaum, director of the $690-million-a-year National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences or NIEHS (an NIH agency in the HHS). Birnbaum is also a member of the Collegium Ramazzini and has directed over $90 million of US taxpayer funds to her Ramazzini colleagues, many of whom serve on numerous IARC “expert panels.”

Evidence is accumulating that Brinbaum has worked closely with anti-chemical pressure groups and even trial lawyers, thereby undermining the US regulatory and chemical review process and perhaps ultimately forcing glyphosate off the market. She has helped to coordinate and direct these activities, and has turned the United States into IARC’s biggest donor, earmarking $4.2 million to support IARC’s current effort to list more agricultural and industrial chemicals as carcinogens – including artificial sweeteners. Even GMO foods are on the agency’s hit list.

The well-funded, carefully coordinated effort to eradicate weed-eradicating glyphosate has also involved a number of devious, secretive, deceptive actions.

The 2014 advisory group that decided IARC would review glyphosate was led by activist statistician Dr. Christopher Portier, who worked for years for NIEHS and Birnbaum. In fact, investigative journalists David Zaruk (Risk-Monger) and Kate Kelland (Reuters) discovered, Portier drove the glyphosate review, while also working for the anti-pesticide Environmental Defense Fund and serving as the only “invited specialist” on the working group that labeled glyphosate carcinogenic.

At the same time, Portier was also advising trial lawyers suing over other chemicals that IARC had found carcinogenic – and shortly after serving on the advisory group signed with the same lawyers to work on their glyphsate suits, a gig for which he has so far been paid $160,000. No conflicts of interest?

Even more outrageous, as Ms. Kelland explained in another article, IARC repeatedly ignored or altered studies that exonerated glyphosate. One report clearly said the researchers “unanimously” agreed that glyphosate had not caused abnormal growths in mice they had studied. IARC deleted the sentence.

In other cases IARC panelists inserted new statistical analyses that reversed a study’s original finding; quietly changed critical language exonerating the chemical; and claimed they were “not able to evaluate” a study because it included insufficient experimental data, while excluding another study because “the amount of data in the tables was overwhelming.” These machinations helped to ensure a “consensus.”

Equally questionable, NIH Cancer Research Institute scientist Aaron Blair conducted a years-long study that also found glyphosate was not carcinogenic. But he held off on publishing his results, and did not divulge his findings, knowing IARC would leave “unpublished” work out of its analysis.

This is not science. It is manipulation and deception – supported by our tax dollars, and used to drive safe, widely used chemicals off the market.

Other activists repeatedly claim “endocrine disrupting” chemicals which don’t cause cancer or other harm in high doses somehow do so at barely detectable levels. Another clever ploy claims no actual exposure is needed; kids get cancer because their parents or grandparents were exposed to something, perhaps years ago. It’s ridiculous. But convincing a jury there’s no cause-effect relationship is a Sisyphean task.

The end result, if not the goal, is to undermine public confidence in science-based risk assessments, lend credibility to agitator claims that countless chemicals contaminate our foods and imperil our health, endlessly frighten consumers, and set the stage for billion-dollar lawsuits to enrich class-action lawyers and organic food interests.

More than 1,000 US lawsuits already claim glyphosate causes cancer, and law firms are running ads saying anyone who has cancer and was ever exposed to glyphosate in any form or amount may be entitled to millions in compensation. Other lawyers are playing the same games with “manmade climate change.”

Ending legal predation will require major state and federal reforms. However, the American people elected this President and Congress to bring transparency and accountability back to Washington and international regulatory agencies. They need to use their oversight and funding powers to do so.

Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith told me he is reviewing Mr. Wild’s response. “Given the serious nature of our concerns related to IARC’s expenditures of taxpayer dollars, IARC should exercise due diligence and provide a complete response to my November 1 letter. The Science Committee will use all tools at our disposal to ensure the stewards of our taxpayers’ dollars are held accountable,” Smith said.

That is good news. Too many regulators and “scientific” panels have the attitude, “We are accountable only to ourselves. We will not have any member of Congress or the Trump Administration presume to tell us how to run our business, do science or be transparent.” That arrogance is intolerable.

Even if Dr. Wild is beyond the reach of US law, Drs. Birnbaum, Portier, Blair, et al. are not. They should be compelled to testify under oath, and funding for their agencies and work should be made contingent on their cooperation in rooting out the apparent secrecy, corruption, conflicts of interest and junk science.

Via email





Why Democrats Lose on Global Warming.

Democratic voters don’t care about climate change very much

Robinson Meyer’s November 15 article for The Atlantic, titled “Democrats Are Shockingly Unprepared to Fight Climate Change,” is an important article because it accurately reports some of the history of the debate over global warming in the United States. For example, Meyer writes:

"In June 2009, Waxman-Markey passed the House. But as that summer wore on, the bill’s prospects floundered. By August, the Tea Party rose to command more media attention, and public opinion turned against Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—focused on passing what would become the Affordable Care Act—declined to take the climate bill to the Senate floor. By the middle of the next summer, Waxman-Markey was effectively dead. Only a few years after it opened, the window to pass climate legislation had already shut"

Meyer’s account doesn’t explain why the Tea Party adopted global warming skepticism, why “public opinion turned against Democrats,” and why members of the Senate convinced Reid to call off a vote on Waxman-Markey. The Heartland Institute and one man, Arthur Robinson, played major roles in all three developments.

Starting in 2007, Heartland began distributing what would eventually be millions of copies of books, brochures, and videos explaining why man-made climate change was not a crisis. It ran over $1 million in ads challenging Al Gore to debate his critics. (Gore never did.) Heartland focused much of its efforts on the nascent Tea Party movement, providing its leaders with free publications, speakers, and other types of support.

In 2009, Art Robinson was going from office to office in the Russell Senate Office Building handing out and discussing a hefty directory of signers of the Petition Project, some 31,000 scientists opposed to legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. He met with senators and their senior staff and patiently explained how the left had hijacked the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and EPA. A brilliant scientist and disarming communicator, Robinson converted scores of people.

Meanwhile, Heartland’s Sandy Liddy Bourne, often accompanied by others from Heartland or allies from Americans for Tax Reform, was going door to door in the Senate with copies of the first volume in the Climate Change Reconsidered series. Senate staff have told us repeatedly that this publication plus Robinson’s directory of scientists, delivered at exactly the right moment, made a big difference in Senate deliberations. No other nonprofit group or individual was so successful in opposing Waxman-Markey.

Meyer also reports,

"Even in defeat, Waxman-Markey cost the party dearly. More than two dozen congressional Democrats who had supported the cap-and-trade bill lost in the 2010 midterm election. The casualties included Rick Boucher, a 14-term veteran of Congress whose district included much of southwest Virginia’s coal country. Boucher had negotiated concessions for local coal companies into Waxman-Markey, but this could not save his seat. Ten House Democrats, including Boucher, voted for Waxman-Markey and against the Affordable Care Act. Six of them lost their seats in 2010"

This is the history many members of Congress remember and newcomers need to be reminded of: The last time global warming came up in Congress, in 2010, most of the members who voted for it lost their next elections.

Later in the article, writing about Democrats’ current climate change efforts in Congress, Meyer writes,

"There are only two bills that come close to serving as a flagship bill. The first is the 100 by ’50 Act, released in April by Senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “100 by ’50” is an ambitious economic-planning package that would require 100 percent of American electricity to come from clean or renewable energy by 2050.

The bill’s release was timed to the People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., and McKibben attended its unveiling. It represents the triumph of the 350.org wing of the environmental movement, blocking future fossil-fuel investment and directing plenty of funding to help historically at-risk and marginalized communities. But the 100 by ’50 Act debuted to a fizzle and Sanders, its more prominent cosponsor, spends little time discussing it publicly"

Yup, that’s what happened. They thought by tying this legislation to the People’s Climate March, it would get a big media bump and political momentum. But the march was quickly identified with the emerging “resistance” movement, with meaningless and sometimes violent protests, and with identity politics gone wild. It mobilized the 20 percent hard-left anti-Trump base but turned off the other 80 percent of Americans. The bill got little attention and was quickly forgotten.

Meyer makes a rare admission by a MSM liberal writer:

"… Democratic voters still don’t care about climate change very much. Like other Americans, most of the party’s electorate experience it as a “low-intensity” issue. Though a majority of Americans in every state believe in climate change, very few people use climate policy to decide whom to vote for. Even Democrats say that a candidate’s proposed climate policy matters less when making a voting decision than his or her proposed policies about jobs, health care, the economy, education, income inequality, and terrorism"

This is true about Democrats, but not about Republicans. Climate change is not a “low-intensity” issue for Republican voters because they rank it low on lists of “major problems facing the country.” Just listen to the crowd reactions whenever Trump talks about “energy abundance” and his pro-energy, pro-environment, and pro-jobs agenda.

By ranking climate change low on their list of problems facing the country, Republican voters are telling pollsters they want less – dramatically less – action on global warming than what politicians have given them in the past. They are practically shouting “Stop doing this!!” And the MSM’s take on this is to say it’s a “low intensity issue.” Who’s the “denier” now?

This is another rare and honest admission:

"If Democrats win unified control of Congress and the White House in, say, 2020, history suggests they will get a sliver of time to commit any kind of new policy to statute before public opinion turns against them. During that window, dozens of issues will compete for law makers’ attention."

Democrats, Meyer is saying, can win if they exaggerate and pander to public ignorance on issues like health care and global warming, but once elected and their “solutions” to the fake problems are put on the table, they immediately start to lose public support. Maybe if they were honest during their campaigns, and then did what they promised they would do, their “window” would be more than a “sliver of time.” Trump’s window, for example, is four years wide, maybe eight. Just sayin’.

Near the end of his article, Meyer writes,

"There is, as far as I could find, no think tank putting a bill [on climate change] together or thinking through legislative language. I could barely find professional Democrats planning how a future offensive on the issue would look."

Of course! This is what you would expect if Democrats were merely using fear of catastrophic climate change to get the support of low-information voters, and had no interest in genuinely addressing what they knew to be a fake problem. This is Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark. It’s a damning admission of insincerity on the part of liberals. Pity that more people aren’t paying attention.

This last admission by Meyer reminds me as well of a scene near the end of Michael Crichton’s terrific novel State of Fear where environmental activists are shutting down their offices and moving on to some other issue they can exploit, even before the public realizes it was all just a scam. For the environmentalists in State of Fear, It was never about science or truth or even protecting the environment, only power and keeping a job. And so it is today with the Democratic Party and its many front groups and stenographers in the legacy media.

SOURCE




Gas miners progressing in Australia

TWO Queensland natural gas companies have stitched together a $30 billion gas deal that will generate more than 1000 jobs in the Surat Basin.

The deal between Shell and Arrow Energy will mean the untapped gas reserves in the Surat Basin owned by Arrow will flow through Shell’s QGC LNG project, and will be sold into the export and domestic market from 2020.

It means the end of any ­ambition for Arrow to build its own LNG project and will allow QGC to sell some of the gas to the two other LNG companies, GLNG and APLNG. But it will reignite tensions with farmers in the Cecil Plains area, near Dalby, who have been fighting off CSG companies for years.

Basin Sustainability Alliance chairman Lee McNicholl said there were concerns the project would not mean cheaper gas for Queenslanders, but would further threaten agriculture’s priceless Great Artesian Basin water source.

“Most of the gas will be exported to the highest bidder, while landholders relying on the Hutton’s aquifer, which underlies the Taroom CSG zone, could see this vital resource permanently damaged,” he said.

He said Shell and Arrow had to disclose how much fracking would be done, and Origin’s APLNG had advised BSA members that it could frack up to 40 per cent of wells in its Taroom CSG zones.

The development will take place over 27 years and is likely to be done in a series of staged developments, each one creating about 800 construction jobs. About 200 operational jobs will be created.

It comes just days after QGC turned on its $1.7 billion Charlie gas project in the Surat. The deal will be a significant benefit to Queensland, but is unlikely to resolve the immediate gas shortage.

EnergyQuest’s Graeme Bethune said the deal represented about 12 per cent of Queensland’s known gas reserves. He said the collaboration was a good way forward. Shell owns 50 per cent of Arrow and is the parent company of QGC.

Shell chairwoman Zoe Yujnovich said gas from Arrow would provide more gas to Australian customers. “When more gas is developed, everyone wins. Australians win again because there is more gas to heat our homes and provide energy to our factories, and exporters win because they have more gas to feed their job-creating export projects.”

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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Surprise, surprise!  Climate skeptics don't think polar bears are doomed!

That is the conclusion below in a new paper by the usual suspects. They write as if that identifies skeptics as fools or crooks.  But to support that allegation, they would have to show that skeptics are wrong.  So what are their grounds for believing that skeptics are wrong about the bears?  It is just the usual feeble reliance on "consensus".  I quote from the body of their paper:

"Science-based blogs overwhelmingly used the frame of established scientific certainties and supported arguments with the published literature affirming that warming is rapidly reducing seasonal Arctic sea-ice extent and threatening the mid- to longer-term survival of polar bears"

But the consensus has come under serious challenge, most notably from the writings of specialist Arctic biologist Susan Crockford.  So they do their best to discredit her.  In a carefully-worded statement they say:

"Crockford has neither conducted any original research nor published any articles in the peer-reviewed literature on polar bears"

The part about publication is actually true but she has published extensively in the academic journals on Arctic biology generally.  And there is no doubt that any attempt by her to get anything into the academic journals that questioned the Greenie consensus would fail.  She has however published her observations extensively elsewhere -- in sources not influenced by Greenie censorship.

There are two problems with their attack on Crockford.  The most amusing is that they offer NO detailed refutation of her claims.  They attack her as a person, not her facts.  That is of course the old informal fallacy known in logic as the "ad hominem" fallacy.  And as such it has no scholarly standing whatsoever.

The second problem is that they give the impression that she is a lone dissenting voice.  She is not.  Almost everybody who visits polar bear territory remarks on the frequency of the bears in the places concerned.  And it's not only tourists who see lots of bears.   The International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimated in 1966 that there were 10,000 polar bears in the world; in 2006, the same source estimated that the population had risen to 20,000-25,000 bears.

And how about an excerpt from the Scientific Working Group to the Canada-Greenland Joint Commission on Polar Bear of 2016:

"The genetic mark-recapture assessment of the BB subpopulation resulted in a mean estimate (2012-2013) of total abundance of 2,826 polar bears (95% CI = 2,059-3,593). Due to several limitations of the available data, discussed in detail in this report, the estimates of abundance for the 1990s and 2000s are not directly comparable. Therefore, it is not possible to draw firm conclusions about trends in the abundance of the BB subpopulation. Nevertheless, the study has demonstrated the presence of a subpopulation in Baffin Bay considerably larger than that inferred from previous modeling (1,546 bears cf. PBSG 2015); the results of which formed part of the basis for the PBSG’s (2015) designation of BB as a declining subpopulation."

In plain words that official report says that there are many more bears in that area than thought previously.

And the paper also seems to forget the work of Mitch Taylor:  "Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago"

So the paper below places itself in the warm embrace of conventional thinking -- without addressing the fact that it is the conventional thinking which gives every impression of being wrong. They have built a two-legged stool.  They have failed to undermine the extensive evidence that bear numbers are increasing, not declining


Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy

Abstract

Increasing surface temperatures, Arctic sea-ice loss, and other evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are acknowledged by every major scientific organization in the world. However, there is a wide gap between this broad scientific consensus and public opinion. Internet blogs have strongly contributed to this consensus gap by fomenting misunderstandings of AGW causes and consequences. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) have become a “poster species” for AGW, making them a target of those denying AGW evidence. Here, focusing on Arctic sea ice and polar bears, we show that blogs that deny or downplay AGW disregard the overwhelming scientific evidence of Arctic sea-ice loss and polar bear vulnerability. By denying the impacts of AGW on polar bears, bloggers aim to cast doubt on other established ecological consequences of AGW, aggravating the consensus gap. To counter misinformation and reduce this gap, scientists should directly engage the public in the media and blogosphere.

SOURCE.  There is a report of the above paper in the popular press here and a very detailed dissection of it here





It’s time to modernize the Endangered Species Act; people are more important than bait fish

By Printus LeBlanc

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is the most weaponized law in America. Radical environmentalists use the law as a blunt object to push the zero-growth agenda on the rest of the country, even invading private property. The law prioritizes bait fish over children, kills thousands of jobs, puts people into poverty, and violates the constitution. It is time for Congress to modernize the law and recognize some things are more important than a two-inch fish.

As with most laws passed by Congress, the ESA had good intentions when it was signed into law in 1973. However, that quickly changed when radical environmentalists realized Congress handed them a weapon. One of the first cases after the law’s passage set a precedent for how the ESA could be used as a blunt force object by the federal government and environmental groups.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was building the Tellico Dam in the mid-70s. It was the last of 68 dams constructed in the Tennessee River Valley. A second-year law student at the University of Tennessee, Hiram Hill, submitted a petition to the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list the snail darter, a small fish the size of a paper clip, as endangered. FWS agreed with the petition and ruled the species was endangered. In 1976, Hill filed suit, using the power of the ESA, to seek an injunction and stop construction of the dam.

After several court decisions going back and forth, the case made its way to the Supreme Court in 1978 and became known as TVA v. Hill. The Supreme Court would rule in favor of Hill with Chief Justice Burger delivering the opinion of the court stating, “One would be hard-pressed to find a statutory provision whose terms were any plainer than those in Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act. Its very words affirmatively command all federal agencies ‘to ensure that actions authorized, funded, or carried out by them do not jeopardize the continued existence’ of an endangered species or ‘result in the destruction or modification of habitat of such species . . . .’ 16 U.S.C. 1536 (1976 ed.). This language admits of no exception.”

The federal government and environmental radicals now knew their weapon worked. The Supreme Court ruling gave opponents a blueprint to stop whatever construction project they disagreed with, meaning all.

The Delta Smelt is another small fish causing significant problems. Its habitat is in the Sacramento — San Joaquin River Delta, hence the name Delta Smelt. Never in history has a two-inch fish created so many problems. The small fish was put on the endangered species list in 1993. Since then, biologists and environmental officials have been doing whatever it takes to save the fish, including the not diverting fresh river runoff.

This is a problem because the delta is a giant intersection of snow-melt and ocean. When the snow melts, or it rains in northern California, the runoff is carried to the delta and pumped to 25 million Californians and hundreds of farms. However, the pumps can suck up the fish and are being turned off with the fresh water instead flowing out to sea, despite a 2015 survey only finding one Delta Smelt.

The region around the delta is some of the most fertile farmland in the world. The inability to pump water to the crops is putting hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland at risk. Over a third of the nation’s vegetables and nearly two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts come from California, according to the Department of Agriculture. Central Valley farmers say the bait fish has cost them $1.5 billion in lost income and 40,000 jobs.

Forgetting what the Delta Smelt cost the farmers, workers, and consumers, the California State government is looking at plans to save the bait fish that could cost billions more. They are now discussing plans to build tunnels from northern California that bypass the delta region altogether, thereby negating the need for the pumps. Early estimates have the project costing at least $17 billion, sure to blow up California’s budget deficit.

The ESA doesn’t stop at public projects; it goes onto private property. Developers in Utah are finding this out the hard way. The state has 80,000 prairie dogs with a distinctive black eyebrow marking over each eye, making them “different” from the millions of other prairie dogs in the country. Because the Utah prairie dogs are on the ESA, the owners of the private property are not allowed to develop their private property the way they want, despite there being over 80,000 of them in the state. The developers are now depending on the Supreme Court to take up the case.

Radical environmentalists have succeeded in stopping local and state governments from completing infrastructure projects; now they are intent on preventing private citizens from developing their private property. If the ruling is upheld, how long before property rights become nonexistent?

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning is in favor of an update to the law stating, “The Endangered Species Act is one of the most abused laws in American history. Congress must act to restore the balance and ensure private property rights are restored.”

The ESA must be modernized. Radical environmentalists have used the law as a weapon to kill industries it disagrees with. The private property of citizens and the welfare of families should not be discounted because of a two-inch fish or prairie dogs. It is time for Congress to put people first.

SOURCE





Waters of the US Rule and Clean Water Act Fail to Provide Cost-Effective Improvements in Water Quality

 Executive Summary

To protect navigable waters, the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction extends to waters linked to navigable ones. But because essentially all waters are connected, under the 2015 Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, agencies will assess the degree of connectivity on a case-by-case basis. A recent executive order from President Donald Trump asks the Environmental Protection Agency to rewrite the WOTUS rule using Justice Antonin Scalia’s “continuous surface connection” definition.

All this confusion threatens property rights. Farmers often will not know if their land is under Clean Water Act jurisdiction, yet they can face fines of $25,000 per day of violation for certain activities. If farmers are aware that their land is under Clean Water Act jurisdiction, then they must apply for costly permits: up to $28,915. Moreover, the WOTUS rule fails to address pollution from nonpoint sources and ongoing farming activity. It does not estimate the cost and benefit trade-offs well. In the past 25 years, water quality has seldom improved.

This paper proposes a new, market-based approach to reduce pollution and reach the optimal cost and benefit trade-off. As theorized by Ronald Coase in 1960, property rights would be assigned, to either farmers (right to pollute) or environmentalists (right to clean water). They would then make contracts in which one would accept not to use his or her right fully in exchange of compensation. The initial allocation of property rights is to be established by states. State governments must ensure that parties comply with their contracts. State governments should also support the development of organizations that represent individuals and may use tax dollars to finance them, as these organizations would otherwise suffer from a free-riding problem

SOURCE




Joe Romm is having orgasms about Greenland

Leading to a collapse in logic.  See below. He says that recent temperatures in Greenland have risen by 56 degrees.  But global temperatures have if anything fallen recently.  So if that is not evidence that Greenland changes are the product of non-global influences, what would be? So Greenland changes tell us nothing about global warming

It’s been unusually warm in the United States in recent days, with records being set across the country. But it’s been scorching in Greenland, with temperatures as much as 54° above normal, which means above freezing in many places.

And this comes on the heels of new research from NASA’s aptly-named Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission, which finds that the enormous ice sheet is far more unstable than we realized. That’s bad news because the Greenland ice sheet contains enough land-locked ice to raise sea levels by over 20 feet.

The heat wave began out west last week, with large parts of California sweltering in the 90s. As but one example, the National Weather Service Los Angeles tweeted on Nov. 22 that the 99°F reading at Camarillo Airport in Ventura County not only broke the record for that day (by 9°F), but broke the record for any day that month.

The heat wave moved east after Thanksgiving, and by Tuesday it was blanketing most of the country

In late November, a major heat wave is a welcome event in large parts of the country, with temperatures in the 60s in large swaths of the south and with Minneapolis hitting the upper 40s.

But in a place like Greenland, a monster heat wave this time of year pushes temperatures above freezing. It hit the upper 30s in many coastal towns — with rain forecast in some — which means actual melting over parts of the great ice sheet that should be adding ice right now, not losing it.

As Robert Fanney, a former threat analyst and author of Robert Scribbler’s Blog, explained Monday, this heat wave “will generate brief surface melt conditions for parts of Greenland during late November.”

Significantly, a study earlier this month by NASA’s OMG mission looked at the threat from underneath the ice sheet, specifically “how marine glaciers react to the presence of warm, salty Atlantic Water” (see figure below).

The Geophysical Research Letters study found “new pathways by which AW [Atlantic Waters] can access glaciers with marine-based basins, thereby highlighting sectors of Greenland that are most vulnerable to future oceanic forcing,” which is worsened by global warming. They found that “between 30 and 100% more glaciers are potentially exposed” to Atlantic waters than had been previously thought.

The bottom line is that over half of the entire ice sheet may be at risk from this underwater melting. We knew that global warming is leading to more of the kind of monster heatwaves that intensify and extend the surface melt season on Greenland — the kind it is now experiencing. But we are learning that global warming poses a potentially larger risk to underwater melt from warming ocean waters.

SOURCE





Mining To Build Renewables

Renewables require mined resources over and over again. Yes, they do not last forever once manufactured. It really amazes me when people say, leave coal in the ground. It is toxic, it is killing the planet blah blah blah.

Have any of those people ever bothered to look into how toxic renewables are to the planet?? Probably not… too brainwashed to use their brains!!

They say Coal is putting CO2 emissions into the atmosphere!! Really, that’s a no-brainer. What about Renewables??

Here is a little gem that the Greens and renewable lobbyists do not share with anyone. They support renewables, supposedly because of the fact that they do not emit CO2 into the atmosphere. Correct, but….Lithium ion batteries are also, together with nickel-metal-hydride batteries, the most energy consuming technologies using the equivalent of 1.6kg of oil per kg of battery produced. They are also ranked the worst in greenhouse gas emissions with up to 12.5kg of CO2 equivalent emitted per kg of battery. Now, we are going to need a lot of batteries when Coal is finished!! Oh, and, batteries need to be replaced over and over again too!!

Interesting Facts

Solar panel production is now among the leading sources of , nitrogen triflouride, and sulfur hexaflouride, three extremely potent greenhouse gases which are used for cleaning plasma production equipment.

As a greenhouse gas, hexaflouroethane is 12,000 times more potent than CO2, is 100% manufactured by humans, and survives 10,000 years once released into the atmosphere.

Nitrogen Triflouride is 17,000 times more virulent than CO2, and Sulfur Hexaflouride is 25,000 times more powerful than CO2. Concentrations of nitrogen triflouride in the atmosphere are rising 11% per year.

‘Clean’, ‘green’ solar & wind components rely on Rare Earth minerals from China who supply 96% of supply?

Here is the Green future!

Such an intensive mining operation has a definite impact on the surrounding environment. According to the Chinese Society of Rare Earths, 9,600 to 12,000 cubic meters (340,000 to 420,000 cubic feet) of waste gas—containing dust concentrate, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid—are released with every ton of rare metals that are mined. Approximately 75 cubic meters (2,600 cubic feet) of acidic wastewater, plus about a ton of radioactive waste residue are also produced.

“There’s not one step of the rare earth mining process that is not disastrous for the environment.” That the destruction is mostly unseen and far-flung does not make it any less damaging.

All resources for our clean green future, need to be mined, big holes in the ground, yep, just like a coal mine!! Let’s mine some more!!

SOURCE




Policy Shock – Greens are forcing Australia back to Mining and Farming

Once upon a time Australia was attractive to processing, refining and manufacturing industries using our abundant mineral and food resources, our reliable low-cost coal-fired electricity and a workforce trained in technical skills.

No longer.

Australia used to have 11 oil refineries, spread around the country. There are just 4 left, all over fifty years old, and all in danger of closing down. Green barriers to oil exploration have forced most of them to rely on costly imported crude oil.

We buy our jet fuel from North Asia and have just 19 days supply of aviation fuel in the country. Australia’s diesel supplies sometimes fall to just 13 days of consumption.

Now, for the first time in at least 60 years Australia no longer produces motor vehicles.

China and India have about 430 coal power plants under construction but Australia has not built a single coal-fired power station for seven years - some politicians even rejoice when they manage to close and demolish one.

Brisbane’s new trains are being made in India, Victa mowers are made in China and most coastal shipping died decades ago. Steel works and refineries producing aluminium, copper and zinc are under stress. All these industries are being pushed overseas by costly unreliable electricity and other government barriers and burdens.

Red-green policies being pushed by all major parties are making Australia more dependent on bolted-down industries such as mining and farming that can’t be sent overseas because their basic resources are here. And green opposition to nuclear power increases Aussie reliance on coal.

A century ago Australians relied on wool, wheat, gold, silver, copper, lead-zinc, butter, beef and timber – all products of bolted-down industries.

Red-green policies are pushing us back to those days. Politicians need to remember Newton’s Law of Bureaucracy – whenever the government tries to use the force of law to achieve economic goals the long term results will be equal and opposite to those intended.

So in the long run, red-green energy and environmental policies will make us more dependent on the bolted-down industries they now attack – mining, farming, forestry and fishing.

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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Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast?

UN climate forecasts are consistently high … consistently wrong … and used to drive policy

Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris

Dr. Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, summarized the problem the world faces with climate change policy:  “Would you bet your paycheck on the weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?”

Sowell is right to be skeptical. Meteorologists can’t forecast the weather much beyond 48 hours, as the degree of accuracy diminishes rapidly with every additional day. Yet the same weather agencies, often using the same computer models, since 1990 have said with almost absolute certainty that their 50- and 100-year forecasts are correct. They maintain this illusion today, even though all their long-term forecasts have been wrong.

Moreover, it’s not just your paycheck that you would be putting at risk. It’s reliable, affordable energy for everything you do, and for those you rely on for goods and services. It’s your living standards and future – and your children’s future.

It’s the health and wellbeing of every person in every modern, industrialized nation on earth – and of every person in poor developing countries who dreams of having living standards and opportunities approaching those we are blessed with.

The global warming deception worked because most people don’t know the difference between weather, climate and meteorology. This confusion arose partly because of the historical development of each.

Climate came first, with the word originating from the Greek word for inclination. The ancient Greeks realized that the climate of a region, and how it changed through the year, was primarily determined by the angle of the Sun’s rays. Beyond that, they used evidence from experience and historical patterns.

Aristotle’s student and philosophical successor Theophrastus (371–287 BC) wrote the book Meteorological Phenomena, sometimes called the Book of Signs. Theophrastus was not referring to astrological signs, but weather signs such as the red sky observation that is neatly summed up by the old, and generally correct, adage: “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailors’ delight.”

The Greeks developed short-term forecasts based on observations made over hundreds of years. This use of long-term signs to try and determine short-term weather pervades and guides all communities because of its impact on their food supply. This became more important when humans switched from hunter-gatherer to sedentary agricultural subsistence.

Some simple definitions are important for the public to understand.

Weather is the total of the atmospheric conditions at any given moment. It includes thousands of inputs from cosmic radiation from deep space, heating energy from the bottom of the oceans and everything in between.

Climate is the average weather conditions, and how they change, at a given location, over an extended period of time. While one can describe “daily climate,” obtained by averaging the 24-hourly readings or averaging the minimum and maximum readings in a 24-hour period, much longer periods are normally studied by climatologists. The choice of the beginning and end point of climate studies determines the overall trend. By “cherry picking” this time interval, you can demonstrate virtually any trend you want.

For example, the general temperature trend of the last 140 years was warming, but the trend of the last 1,000 years was cooling. That is why the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tried to rewrite the historical temperature record over the past millennium to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period. It finally had to restore the Warm Period, which existed across Europe and Asia, and is recorded in multiple Chinese texts from that era.

Similarly, you can study climates of various regions, although forecasting regional climate is fraught with uncertainties. Dr. Tim Palmer, leading climate modeler at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, summed the situation up well in a 2008 New Scientist magazine article:

“I don’t want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain.”

Meteorology is the study of the physics of the atmosphere and is the term people associate most with weather forecasting. Meteorologists maintain that their physics is correct. Then why are their forecasts so often wrong? The answer is inferred in mathematician and philosopher A.N. Whitehead’s comment that,

“There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.”

The IPCC defends its long-term climate forecasts by maintaining that a weather forecast is different from a climate forecast. But climate is an average of the weather, and one cannot generate accurate results by averaging inaccurate ones.

Thus, starting in 1990, the IPCC stopped making forecasts – because they were never right. Instead they began publishing a range of “projections.” Yet, they too were hopelessly at odds with what actually happened in the real world. Worse, the news media, climate activists, politicians and regulators treat the “projections” as predictions, or forecasts, for purposes of stirring up public anxiety and trying to justify draconian anti-fossil fuel policies.

Indeed, these failed projections underlay the extreme, economically damaging, and completely unnecessary policy prescriptions that were presented earlier this month at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany.

So, the answer to Sowell’s question is clear. No country – certainly not successful, developed nations like the United States or Canada – should bet a nickel of taxpayers’ money on the UN’s failed global warming predictions.

Poor, struggling, developing countries are even more strongly advised to ignore UN predictions and energy policy prescriptions – unless they want to be mired in poverty and misery for another century.

Via email



The Real Story Behind The Heartland Institute’s Role In The Trump Admin

Have you read The Washington Post lately? If so, you probably read about a “fringe” group of global warming deniers working behind the scenes to push President Donald Trump’s administration ever farther to the right.

WaPo depicted the conservative Heartland Institute’s November meeting in Houston, Texas, as full of activists unhappy with the Trump administration’s progress on undoing liberal climate policies.

Heartland held similar meetings in June and September. Details from those meetings were also leaked to the press, cultivating a media narrative of a fringe conservative group pulling the strings behind Trump’s policies from the Paris accord withdrawal, to opening lands to drilling and eliminating climate programs.

Jim Lakely, Heartland’s communications director, isn’t surprised with the media’s take, he told The Daily Caller News Foundation. This is part of an effort to delegitimize Heartland’s work and drive a wedge between them and the Trump administration, he said.

“The tone of it is that the climate realist right isn’t happy with Trump’s progress,” Lakely told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Every meeting participant — except one cited many times by WaPo — was ecstatic with Trump’s progress.

“It’s a complete 180 from what Hillary Clinton would have done,” Lakely said. “I think it’s remarkable what Trump has been able to get done.”

That’s not the impression you’re left with after reading WaPo’s recent expose. In fact, Lakely has taken issue with the media’s portrayal of Heartland’s activities, portraying the Chicago-based think tank as a fringe group that pushes secretive policy memos at closed-door meetings.

On the contrary, Heartland has always been public about its ultimate goals — to keep global warming alarmists from winning the public debate. The group has certainly not been coy about its public policy goals of rolling back former President Barack Obama’s administration’s global warming regulatory regime.

Heartland even published online an energy and climate policy checklist for Trump shortly after Trump’s 2016 election win.

Always A Target

Heartland CEO Joe Bast isn’t surprised with the media’s portrayal of Heartland. Environmental activists have been attacking the Heartland Institute for years over their skeptical stance on man-made global warming.

“The left demonizes us,” Bast told TheDCNF, referring to environmentalist campaigns to smear them in the media. The Illinois-based think tank began seriously critiquing climate science in 2007, and since then, they’ve only attracted more vitriol from liberal groups.

Heartland is now in the spotlight for its influence with the Trump administration.

WaPo claimed audio recordings and a three-page document obtained from Heartland’s Houston meeting “highlight the extent to which those on the right are pushing Cabinet members … to enact even more sweeping changes,” according to an article published Nov. 15.

The meeting showed “how conservatives are working to place key allies in top policy posts in the White House and elsewhere, including on boards that help guide federal policy,” the paper argued.

However, Bast said that’s not how the group operates. The meetings convened to prepare scientists and economists who could do a good job in federal agencies or on advisory boards.

SOURCE




The Paris Agreement: A Fairytale’s Failure

The Paris Agreement is all set to become a massive failure. Major member states of the Paris agreement are set to miss the deadlines to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.

Why is it a debacle?

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) states that the Paris Agreement’s aim is to limit the global temperature rise to below 1.5–2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, by the end of this century.

To accomplish this target, it required member states to commit to a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, believing that this would offset the supposed rise in global temperature levels.

This proposal hinged on scientifically inaccurate conclusions regarding the role of carbon dioxide in increasing the global temperature levels.

There is no scientific proof that carbon dioxide is the primary source for the increase in global temperature levels. Moreover, the global temperature has not displayed any dangerous increase in the past 100 years.

The only probable support for the theory of dangerous increase in temperature levels comes from the UN sponsored computer climate models that use false assumptions.

Climatologists unanimously acknowledged the flaw, when these computer models failed to reflect the temperature fluctuations during the past 17 years, despite a consistent increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

The models were designed to portray an alarming increase in temperature that is nowhere to be seen in the real world. Besides, the models used carbon dioxide as the major forcing factor for temperature increase, thereby providing a means to justify the unholy war on carbon dioxide emissions from human activity.

These faulty temperature projections from the models were the very basis for the Paris Agreement. The UNFCC has completely ignored the failure of these models and continues use their projections as a scare-tactic.

With the help of mainstream media and using political advantage, the proponents of climate alarmism tried to shield the agreement from critique and kept the juggernaut rolling.

But, not anymore!

The UNFCCC required each signatory country to make a commitment and submit a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). The NDC’s of each signatory contained the agreed targets to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in phased manner.

The Paris Agreement’s webpage boasts that 168 countries have ratified the agreement.

This number indicates neither the success of ratification nor the proportionate contribution of the key signatories. It also conveniently ignores the non-ratification by the U.S., which is the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide.

The regime shift saw the U.S. withdrawing its support for the Paris Agreement. The Trump administration scrapped the clean power plan and indicated that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), if any, is not an immediate concern for the country.

With the second largest signatory pulling out, the eyes of the alarmists turned east.

China is the largest emitter and India is one of the top five emitters of carbon dioxide. Between them they also have roughly three-tenths of the world’s population, and large percentages of their populations desperately need energy from fossil fuels to rise out of poverty—fuels they wouldn’t be able to use while simultaneously making significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Not surprisingly, therefore, both countries have refused to make substantial reductions in their carbon dioxide emissions.

Their NDC’s are ambiguous regarding future commitments and projections indicate that they will miss the targets of whatever little commitments they have made.

Both countries have announced a continued increase in new coal power plant installations and have increased their targets for production and import of coal.

In fact, India’s chief economic adviser slammed what he called ‘carbon imperialism’ by the global warming alarmists and called for a coal coalition to encourage the empowerment of coal power plants globally.

Europe too is falling apart. Europe’s largest emitter, Germany, will miss its reduction targets. Germany is also facing serious energy challenges because of its efforts to promote renewables. It has the largest number of coal power plants in Western Europe and the demand for coal has increased.

Germany is not alone. The UK, France, Netherlands, and Australia—all will miss their individual emission reduction targets.

More member states will benefit from withdrawing from the agreement, as it will reduce the economic cost of depending on heavily subsidized and unreliable solar and wind energy systems. It will also accelerate and expedite their journey towards meeting the energy demands in their respective countries.

Even before a year, forecasts suggested a failure of Paris agreement. With the tectonic shift in global climate change politics, 2017 has further rendered the Paris agreement ineffective and futile.

Prophets of climate doom continue proclaiming “The end is near!” But the end that’s near is not that of the planet or the climate or human or natural wellbeing but that of the Paris agreement. The world will soon be free from the fairytale of climate alarmism that it had espoused during the past two decades.

SOURCE




The Climate Alarmists Definitely Don't Believe Their Own Propaganda

Is man-caused climate change a crisis that requires immediate action to reduce and eliminate carbon emissions to save the planet?  Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a frequently-repeated phrase that he uses on this subject, which is "I'll believe that it's a crisis when the people who claim it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis."

Plenty of people have pointed to extreme examples of the "do as I say, not as I do" syndrome in the climate wars.  Twenty-three thousand people (23,000!!!!) jet off to Bonn to cook up schemes to force others to fly less.  Al Gore has a 10,000+ square foot house that uses more than 20 times the amount of energy as the average American home -- and that's just one of his multiple houses!  And so forth.  But just because these people behave this way does not necessarily mean that they don't believe their own propaganda; it may just mean that they believe that the burden of sacrifice needs to be on you rather than on themselves.  But are there some of their actions that go further and prove that they really know that it's all bullshit?

Because it's hard to get people too worked up over the idea that the temperature might rise a couple of degrees -- or even three! -- the big scare story always tends to revert to sea level rise.  Antarctica is going to melt and we're all going to drown!!  Or something like that.  An article from the Guardian a few days ago (November 3) is typical of the genre:

Hundreds of millions of urban dwellers around the world face their cities being inundated by rising seawaters if latest UN warnings that the world is on course for 3C of global warming come true, according to a Guardian data analysis.

OK then, undoubtedly the progressive climate-alarm-believing elite would situate themselves well away from the dangerous coastlines at some respectable higher elevation.  Actually, not at all.  The progressive and supposedly climate-alarm-believing elite clusters itself just as close along the coastlines as it can get:  New York, LA, San Francisco, Seattle.  In New York and San Francisco particularly, favored perches of the alarmists line up right along the waterfront.  Tenants of my own office building -- no more than about 30 feet above mean high tide in downtown Manhattan -- include Vox Media.  Or consider the Goldman Sachs headquarters, just a couple of hundred feet inland, and barely elevated abov the sea:

I guess that tells you what the smart money thinks.  Would they really have put a billion dollar building there if they thought there was anything to this sea level rise thing?

Or consider the case of nuclear power.  If carbon emissions really were a huge existential crisis, there is exactly one way to replace the energy we currently get from fossil fuels with energy that is sufficiently abundant and reliable, and reasonable enough in cost, to be a real way to power a modern economy for the entire world.  That is nuclear.  (By the way, I'm not saying that I am a fan of nuclear power.  As far as I'm concerned, we should take what the market provides without government meddling and subsidies, and likely that is almost entirely fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.  But what I am saying is that if climate alarmists think that it is absolutely essential to de-carbonize the world economy, then there is only one way to do that without destroying it, and that is widespread adoption of nuclear power.)

Undoubtedly then, the people who are really concerned with climate crisis should be advocating loudly for expansion of nuclear power to replace fossil fuels.  Funny, but you literally can't find that.  Yes, there are a few examples of lonely individuals out there making this point, but literally no example from any major environmental organization.  For instance: 

Natural Resources Defense Council?  "Expanding nuclear power is not a sound strategy for diversifying America’s energy portfolio and reducing global warming pollution."

Sierra Club?  "Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer.  The Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy."

Greenpeace?  "Greenpeace got its start protesting nuclear weapons testing back in 1971. We’ve been fighting against nuclear weapons and nuclear power ever since."

Union of Concerned Scientists?  "Current security standards are inadequate to defend nuclear plants against terrorist attacks."

You could go on with this as long as you want.

So what's going on here?  There is no way to avoid the conclusion that the biggest promoters of the climate scare don't actually believe their own propaganda.  But there are several other reasonable hypotheses for why they continue.  For the environmental groups, the reasonable hypothesis is that scaremongering and alarmism are the sine qua non of fundraising.  The leaders of the environmental groups themselves know, because they have to, that intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar cannot meaningfully de-carbonize the world economy.  But the halting advance of those non-workable energy sources means no imminent solutions and therefore a never-ending crisis that can keep career-long sinecures going.

SOURCE



Want a nuclear reactor in your backyard? Step this way

Volunteer communities are being sought for Australia’s first small nuclear reactors, which developers hope could be in operation by 2030.

SMR Nuclear Technology has set a timeline for the development of Australia’s nuclear power ­industry, which would require a site to be identified within three years. Building nuclear power stations in Australia would require changes to state and federal laws and overcoming deep community objections. SMR director Robert Pritchard said the company had adopted an aggressive approach to nuclear development in ­Australia based on small reactors.

“We now realise that politicians will follow the community view,” Mr Pritchard said. “We have to get out and spend a year getting the community on side.” He said interest had been widespread.

In a submission to the Energy Security Board, Sydney-based SMR said small modular reactors had become a game-changer. “It would be imprudent not to factor SMR nuclear generation into Australia’s energy security plan at this time,” SMR said.

The company claims nuclear offers the prospect of safe, affordable energy free of greenhouse gas emissions. “Nuclear may be the only reliable, low-emissions source of electricity generation technology that is suitable for you, unless your area has an unlimited supply of water for hydro electric,” the SMR pitch says.

“The construction of any ­nuclear power plant is currently prohibited by Australian law but there is a growing realisation that maintaining the reliability and ­affordability of our electricity ­supply whilst lowering emissions will require all low-emissions technologies to be considered.”

SMR said small modular reactors were compatible with renewables, factory built and affordable.

It said despite the billions of dollars spent on renewables, Australia had not yet been successful in significantly reducing emissions from electricity generation.

The company said the most ­recent cost analysis by the UK ­Energy Options Network showed the levelled cost of electricity for nuclear was an average of $US60/MWh and as low as $US36/MWh. It said at the lowest level, new nuclear plants could be the lowest-cost generation available.

The construction and operation of a nuclear power plant in Australia is prohibited by two commonwealth acts: similar prohibitions exist in state law. SMR said these prohibitions were put in place at a time when there was no real appreciation of the contribution that modern, safe nuclear power plants could make to ­energy security, affordability and emissions reduction.

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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