Ice shelf connected to Antarctic's doomsday glacier is CRACKING: Eastern part that is the size of Florida will likely break free within five years and trigger 25 INCH rise in sea levels

"Doomsday" my foot. Not exactly scientific vocabulary. The prophecy is a lot of excitement about a small part of West Antarctica. When glaciers split bits off into icebergs they normally come from West Antactica

A refreshing aspect of the article below is that it gives coverage to the subsurface vulcanism that is very influential in West Antarctic melting. I have been noting it for years but it would seem that even Greenies now feel obliged to mention it.

There is no way of quantifying any global influence or any volcanic influence on the melting so any claim that global warming is involved is mere speculation

The front portion of the doomsday glacier in Antarctica has an 'alarming crack' that could lead to it breaking off in just five years.

Part of the Thwaites Glacier, it is the size of Florida and its melting accounts for about four percent of the global sea level rise.

New data, released on Monday, shows warming oceans is causing the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf (TEIS) to lose its grip on the submarine shoal, or bank, that acts as a pinning point to hold it to the rest of the glacier – which is also causing cracks across its surface.

Satellite images presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union show several large, diagonal cracks extending across TEIS.

'If this floating ice shelf breaks apart, the Thwaites Glacier will accelerate and its contribution to sea level rise will increase by as much as 25%,' the researchers shared during the presentation.

'There is going to be dramatic change in the front of the glacier, probably in less than a decade,' glaciologist Prof Ted Scambos, US lead coordinator for the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), told BBC. 'Both published and unpublished studies point in that direction.

'This will accelerate the pace (of Thwaites) and widen, effectively, the dangerous part of the glacier.'

Lead author of the study, Erin Pettit from Oregon State University, compares the growing crack to that seen in a windshield – one small bump to the car and the windshield could break into hundreds of pieces.

When the shelf fails, the eastern third of Thwaites Glacier will melt at an even more rapid pace. Pettit told Science Magazine this would triple the speed and increase the glacier's contribution to global sea level in the short term to five percent.

'We have mapped out weaker and stronger areas of the ice shelf and suggest a 'zig-zag' pathway the fractures might take through the ice, ultimately leading to break up of the shelf in as little as 5 years, which result in more ice flowing off the continent,' the team wrote in the abstract for its presentation.

'The central part of TEIS has no obvious surface crevasses and smooth surface topography, except for the surface expression of a pronounced basal channel aligned parallel to ice flow. Despite this smooth surface, ground-penetrating radar shows a weak zone of thin ice and complex basal topography, including numerous basal crevasses, that is not in local hydrostatic equilibrium.

'This local disequilibrium suggests the presence of elevated vertical shear stresses that further weaken this critical part of the ice shelf.'

Climate change is not the only culprit here, but a study in August found that Thwaites Glacier is also melting because of the heat from Earth itself.

The Thwaites Glacier — which has been called the 'Doomsday Glacier' due to its impact on sea level rise — is being hit with heat from the Earth's crust, as it is only 10 to 15 miles deep below West Antarctica, compared to around 25 miles in East Antarctica.

This results in an a 'geothermal heat flow of up to 150 milliwatts per square meter,' the study's lead author, Dr Ricarda Dziadek, said in a statement.

Since 1980, it has lost at least 600 billion tons of ice, according to a 2017 analysis done by the New York Times, using data from NASA JPL.

'The temperature on the underside of the glacier is dependent on a number of factors – for example whether the ground consists of compact, solid rock, or of meters of water-saturated sediment,' explained co-author and AWI geophysicist Dr Karsten Gohl.

'Water conducts the rising heat very efficiently. But it can also transport heat energy away before it can reach the bottom of the glacier.'

The Thwaites glacier is slightly smaller than the total size of the UK, approximately the same size as the state of Washington, and is located in the Amundsen Sea.

It is up to 4,000 metres (13,100 feet thick) and is considered a key in making projections of global sea level rise.

The glacier is retreating in the face of the warming ocean and is thought to be unstable because its interior lies more than two kilometres (1.2 miles) below sea level while, at the coast, the bottom of the glacier is quite shallow.

The Thwaites glacier has experienced significant flow acceleration since the 1970s. From 1992 to 2011, the centre of the Thwaites grounding line retreated by nearly 14 kilometres (nine miles). Annual ice discharge from this region as a whole has increased 77 percent since 1973.

Because its interior connects to the vast portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that lies deeply below sea level, the glacier is considered a gateway to the majority of West Antarctica’s potential sea level contribution.

The collapse of the Thwaites Glacier would cause an increase of global sea level of between one and two metres (three and six feet), with the potential for more than twice that from the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10305947/Ice-shelf-Antarctics-doomsday-glacier-CRACKING-likely-break-free-five-years.html

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Problems of charging electric vehicles

Look beyond the glamorous, high­tech­ filled automobiles that most obviously embody the ev revolution and a merciless bottleneck appears. Not even those eyeing a new ev are sufficiently aware of it. Governments are only waking up to the problem. Put simply: how will all the electric cars get charged?

The current number of public chargers—1.3m—cannot begin to satisfy the demands of the world’s rapidly expanding electric fleet. According to an estimate by the International Energy Agency (iea), a forecaster, by the end of this decade 40m public charging points will be needed, requiring an annual investment of $90bn a year as 2030 approaches. If net­zero goals are to be met, by 2050 the world will need five times as many.

Governments’ current pledges to phase out ice cars and shift to evs are, it is true, not quite consistent with net­zero. Even if roads turn electric less speedily than they should, though, the sums the world needs to spend on charging infrastructure are still stupendous. In a slower scenario envisaged by Bloombergnef (bnef), a research firm, in which ev sales keep rising as battery prices fall but reach just under a third of all vehicles sold by 2030, roughly $600bn of investment would still be needed by 2040. That would pay for fewer chargers than the iea foresees—24m public points alone by 2040 (and 309m in total). If net­zero is to be achieved by 2050, bnef puts the cumulative charging investment required at a whopping $1.6trn.

Besides installing too few public chargers, the charging industry’s operational record is poor. The official number currently exceeds what some authorities reckon is needed. The European Commission, for example, thinks every ten evs require one public charger. According to the Boston Consulting Group (bcg), there are now five evs per charging point in the eu and China, and nine in America.

That is in theory. In practice, a survey of chargers in China by Volkswagen (vw) found many inoperable or “iced” chargers (those blocked inadvertently or deliberately by fossil­-fuelled cars). Only 30­-40% of China’s 1m public points were available at any time. It is safe to assume some inoper­ability in the eu and America. This summer Herbert Diess, vw’s boss, complained on Linkedin, a social network, that his holiday had gone less than smoothly because Ionity, a European charging network, provided too few points on the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy. “Anything but a premium charging experience,” Mr Diess wrote. That vw part­-owns Ionity made the criticism sting more.

Drivers can smell trouble ahead. Range anxiety and the availability of public charging is a huge issue (see chart 1). In a recent survey by Alixpartners, a consultancy, in the seven countries that make up 85% of global ev sales the cars’ high prices came third on the list of top five reasons not to switch to battery power; the four others were all worries related to charging.

To assess the scale of the challenge start with the basics. A big advantage of evs is that they can be charged at home—or at workplaces, if employers install chargers. In America 70% of homes have off­street parking where a charger can be installed (the equivalent figure is lower in Europe and China). bcg estimates that in 2020 home and workplace charging accounted for nearly three-­quarters of the total charging energy use in America, seven­tenths in Europe and three-­fifths in China.

Current ev models typically have batteries with ranges of around 400km. Some go over 650km. The average American drives 50km a day, according to Bank of America. Europeans and Chinese drive less. Two types of charger are good enough to top up vehicles, or give them a boost overnight at home or during the working day. The slowest, providing up to 8km of range an hour, can do the job. So do “level 2” chargers that provide 16­32km. Both are easy on the wallet. Drivers can use dedicated sockets that cost a few hundred dollars (and are often subsidised by governments) to tap the cheapest electricity tariffs.

Nonetheless, home and workplace charging only gets you so far. As ev owner­ship spreads from wealthier households to people living in flats or dwellings without the ability to plug in, a public network becomes vital. In America, Europe and China demand for public charging is expected to increase (see chart 2). Public chargers come in three varieties. A common kind is kerbside charging, via converted lampposts or other dedicated points, where cars might park overnight. Then there is “destination” charging, of the sort that is becoming more widely available in car parks at shopping centres, restaurants, cinemas and the like. Both kinds are level­2, with installation costs usually between $2,000 and $10,000 per point....

Governments will act. America’s new infrastructure law sets aside $7.5bn for the installation of 500,000 public points by 2030. Mandates such as that recently announced in Britain requiring new homes, workplaces and retail sites to have charging points, adding 145,000 every year, are likely to become more common. A reason for optimism is that improvements in batteries should continue to offer ever longer ranges, and so less need for frequent charging. Newer batteries will be replenished more rapidly than today’s are, and chargers will provide current more swiftly.

Doubts about the ramp-­up nevertheless persist. The numbers are still small relative to the vast scale of charging networks the world needs. More money will be required to update electricity grids to distribute power to the new source of demand. bcg forecasts that America, Europe and China, home to most of the world’s evs, will have only 6.5m public chargers between them by 2030—not enough to meet the iea’s global target of 40m. More cars will vie for each charger. Drivers may need to seek patience as well as thrills.

https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/current-situation/bnl-economist-20211210-09b36da6b99

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Fossil fuels for China: Decarbonisation for everyone else

A new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) warns that China has no intention of decarbonising. Although it says it will reduce CO2 emissions, in reality the Communists’ hold on power will slip without the constant economic growth that only fossil fuels can bring.

The paper’s author, China expert Patricia Adams, says that China is intent on becoming the world’s sole superpower and is using every means at its disposal to secure fossil fuels to drive its growth.

Ms Adams said:

"Beijing revealed its hand at COP26, ensuring that the text was watered down to the point of being meaningless."

But Adams warns that China’s insistence that it will reduce CO2 emissions in future hides a dangerous agenda:

"For President Xi, the decarbonisation agenda is just a very easy way to get the West to weaken itself. He will make all the right noises, but nothing more."

As far as China’s Communist Party is concerned, carbon dioxide reductions only make sense for those Beijing wishes to harm and supplant.

patricia.adams@probeinternational.org

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NY Times Claims Brazil Is Turning Into Desert, As Foliage Growth in fact surges

The New York Times published an article Friday titled, “A Slow-Motion Climate Disaster: The Spread of Barren Land.” The article claims global warming is causing drought in northeastern Brazil, turning the region into a desert. Objective satellite measurements of vegetation, however, show increasing vegetation in northeast Brazil and throughout Brazil as a whole, not the other way around. The Times article is merely another example of agenda-driven fake climate news.

In its subtitle, the article claims, “Brazil’s northeast, long a victim of droughts, is now effectively turning into desert. The cause? Climate change and the landowners who are most affected.” The article adds, “Climate change is intensifying droughts in Brazil’s northeast, leaving the land barren. The phenomenon, called desertification, is happening across the planet.”

NASA satellite instruments have precisely measured the amount of vegetation throughout the Earth since the early 1980s. NASA reported its findings in an article titled “Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds.” According to NASA, “From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” Most of the rest of the land shows little change one way or the other, while a very small amount of land shows a decline in vegetation.

As a whole, “The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States,” NASA reports.

In the chart below, provided by NASA, you can see that nearly all of Brazil, including nearly all of northeast Brazil, is enjoying a significant increase in vegetation. Only a few, very small areas of Brazil and northeast Brazil are seeing a decline in vegetation.

The Times is right that where farmers or ranchers are deliberately removing rainforest and replacing it with farms or rangeland, vegetation declines. But that is not due to climate change, and those are about the only places in Brazil where vegetation is not increasing as the Earth modestly warms.

The simple, undeniable truth is that vegetation is increasing virtually everywhere in Brazil. The New York Times, in order to promote a fictitious climate crisis, is telling provably wrong lies to sell newspapers and to sell alarm.

https://climaterealism.com/2021/12/ny-times-claims-brazil-is-turning-into-desert-as-foliage-growth-surges/

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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BY GEORGE, HE HASN'T GOT IT

An email below from Henry N. Geraedts, PhD [arbutuspoint@gmail.com] in Canada

It certainly stretches credulity when the Guardian's George "Moonbat" Monbiot writes that environmentalists should "remember that while we have been proved right about most things, we have been consistently wrong about the dates for mineral exhaustion." Never bothered to read Julian Simon, it would seem.

The environmental movement proved right about most things? Right. Let's see now: DDT, nuclear energy, Erlich's global population explosion and famine, Borlaugh's green revolution, GMOs, the ozone layer and in the ongoing saga, AGW/ACC. Even the most cursory review tells us the environmentalists were fundamentally wrong on all accounts.

By their very nature, messianic movements like environmentalism are blind to their mistakes, and thus can not learn from them. Even when demonstrably wrong, environmentalists remain prisoner to the fallacies of static thinking and linear extrapolations. They are nevertheless as a matter of course always right. Left unchecked, they are also quite willing to resort to totalitarian measures to ensure that their view of thing prevails, as evidenced by the interview with Mayer Hillman in which he dismisses democracy and its principles as so much bunk to be cast aside so environmentalism can save the world.

The environmental movement in fact stands out as the true Flat Earth Society, constantly looking to build fences to save us others, the mindless masses, from falling off the edge.





AT BALI, GERMANY PUSHES EMISSIONS CUTS; AT HOME IT PUSHES COAL PLANTS

German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel is promoting a plan to cut emissions blamed for global warming by 40 percent at this week's climate talks in Bali, Indonesia. At home, RWE AG is building three power plants fired by coal, the fuel that produces the most greenhouse gases. While Germany proposes to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by encouraging the use of renewable energy such as biofuels and windfarms, more than half the new power stations planned for Germany will be fueled by coal, according to Essen-based RWE, the nation's second-biggest utility.

Power companies are choosing coal, which produces twice as much carbon-dioxide as natural gas, over cleaner fuels because world leaders have failed to agree on a strategy for reducing emissions. Without incentives to build less-polluting plants, utilities are guessing about which fuels will be most profitable and delaying investments until an agreement is reached. "You have to take the risk or otherwise you are out of the market,'' said Henning Rentz, RWE's policy chief. The energy utility is building a 2.2 billion-euro ($3.3 billion) power plant fueled by Germany's plentiful brown coal.

Representatives from almost 200 nations are meeting this week in Bali to begin talks on a successor to the emission-limiting Kyoto treaty, which expires in 2012. The conference is designed to lay the groundwork for further negotiations that will produce a comprehensive agreement by 2009.

Worldwide, power companies must build $11.6 trillion of plants by 2030 to meet demand for power, according to the International Energy Agency. Without clear guidance from the Bali talks, utilities will continue to rely on coal, said Lars Josefsson, chief executive officer of Vattenfall AB, the Nordic region's biggest utility. "You'll have higher prices and you'll have more carbon dioxide being emitted,'' Josefsson said. An agreement ``would reduce the risk premiums of new investments.'' Stockholm-based Vattenfall is building three coal plants in Germany, including a 1.7 billion-euro project near Hamburg.

FULL STORY here





MORE EVIDENCE THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS A NATURAL, RECURRING PROCESS

(From Quaternary Science Reviews, Article in Press)

Holocene optimum events inferred from subglacial sediments at Tschierva Glacier, Eastern Swiss Alps

By U.E. Joerin et al.

Abstract

This study investigates the subglacial sedimentary archive at Tschierva Glacier, Eastern Swiss Alps. Subfossil wood remains found at the retreating glacier tongue indicate that their emergence results from recent transport from an upvalley basin. A confluence-basin-like structure was found to exist by georadar measurements underneath the present glacier. In combination with high resolution age determinations based on dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating it is implied that a retreated Tschierva Glacier allowed vegetation growth and sediment accumulation in that basin. Three periods of glacier recession were detected, which occurred around 9200 cal yr BP, from 7450 to 6650 cal yr BP and from 6200 to 5650 cal yr BP. These periods are called Holocene optimum events (HOE). Accordingly, an equilibrium line rise >220 m compared to the reference period from 1960 to 1985 was inferred from digital elevation models of former glacier extents. Since glacier mass balance depends on summer (June-July-August) temperature and precipitation, an equilibrium line altitude (ELA) rise of 220 m implies a summer temperature increase of about 1.8 øC assuming unchanged precipitation during the dated HOE. Alternative calculations point to probable temperature increase in a broad interval between +1.0 øC taking into account a precipitation change of ?250 mm/a to +2.5 øC with +250 mm/a precipitation change, supporting earlier paleotemperature estimates. It is proposed that higher mean summer insolation caused a stronger seasonality during the mid-Holocene as compared to late Holocene conditions. [...]

5. Conclusions

Our results indicate smaller glaciers than the 1985 reference level on at least three occasions during the early and mid-Holocene in accordance with earlier studies on Holocene glacier recessions (Orombelli and Mason, 1997; Nicolussi and Patzelt, 2000a; Hormes et al., 2001). The timing of glacier recessions and readvances was inferred from dendrochronological and radiocarbon dating. The results indicate that a first HOE started around 9200 cal yr BP and further periods lasted from 7450 to 6650 cal yr BP and from 6200 to 5650 cal yr BP. Tree-ring analysis implies a glacier advance shortly after 6630 cal yr BP and probably an advance with two phases around 5800 and 5650 cal yr BP, respectively. The events are dated with high accuracy and improve the existing chronology of glacier fluctuations derived by radiocarbon dating at six Swiss glaciers (Joerin et al., 2006). Our chronology implies that the total duration of HOEs during the Atlantic lasted as long as 1400 yr, more than twice as long as previous studies suggested (R”thlisberger, 1986). Glacier recessions for the same periods are also reported from Norway (Matthews et al., 2005), Baffin Island (Miller et al., 2005) or British Columbia (Menounos et al., 2004).

Stratigraphic, geomorphological and glaciological observations pinpoint to a source area of former wood growth in small upvalley basins. Such structures are confirmed by georadar measurements and exist underneath the present glacier at an altitude around 2300 m asl. The position of former tree growth restricts the extent of Tschierva Glacier during the HOE. Accordingly, the calculation of a former ELA suggests a local ELA at elevations above 3040 m asl or a rise in ELA >220 m compared to the 1985 reference for periods as long as 800 yr. Therefore, the range of Holocene ELAs may exceed a total amplitude of 320 m resulting from the Holocene extremes of an ELA depression around 100 m for the LIA and a 220 m rise for the HOE.

The summer (JJA) temperature during each HOE is calculated to have increased by +1.8 øC under the assumptions of an upward ELA shift of 220 m and no change in precipitation (based on a P-T-ELA model after Ohmura et al. (1992)). The periods of smaller glaciers than present agree with the results of biotic proxies (Tinner et al., 1996; Heiri et al., 2003; Nicolussi et al., 2005). Since mean annual temperatures remained almost unchanged during the mid-Holocene (von Grafenstein, et al., 1999) it is suggested that changes in insolation mainly caused an enhanced seasonality with higher summer temperatures at that time. As a consequence, the Tschierva Glacier advances after 6630 cal yr BP and around 5800 and 5650 cal yr BP represent centennial scale glacier fluctuations which probably occurred superimposed on a multi-millennial trend of generally shorter glaciers during the Atlantic.

Following is a report of a late 2006 study with similar conclusions to the above




SWISS ALPS GLACIER LENGHTH DURING THE HOLOCENE

Discussing: Hormes, A., Beer, J. and Schluchter, C. 2006. A geochronological approach to understanding the role of solar activity on Holocene glacier length variability in the Swiss Alps. Geografiska Annaler Series A 88: 281-294.

What was done

The authors determined radiocarbon dates of 71 samples of wood and peat found in the basal shear planes and proglacial outwashes of eight mid-latitude glaciers in the Central Swiss Alps; and by virtue of the dates clustering within discrete time intervals, they were able to specify periods during which the glaciers' leading edges were less extended than they were during the 1990s.

What was learned

Hormes et al. determined that "the glaciers investigated were less extensive than during the 1990s, with a shorter length during several defined periods." These periods were: 10,110-9550, 9210-7980, 7450-6500, 6370-5950, 5860-3360, 2940-2620 and 2500-1170 years before present. They also report that "some of these periods with reduced glacier lengths are also documented on Svalbard in the Arctic, the Subantarctic Kerguelen islands in the Indian Ocean, and in Scandinavia." In addition, they state that "the defined radiocarbon-dated periods with less extensive glaciers coincide well with periods of reduced 14C production, pointing to the sun's role in glacier variation processes."

What it means

Contrary to the strident claim of Hansen et al. (2006) that probably the planet as a whole" is approximately as warm now as at the Holocene maximum," the findings of Hormes et al. suggest that for huge periods of the Holocene this statement was likely far from the truth, not only for the Central Swiss Alps, but also for the other parts of the planet where similar Holocene contractions of glacier lengths have been observed. In addition, there is reason to believe that much of the world's superior warmth during those many earlier periods (when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was only about two-thirds of what it is today) was orchestrated by variations in the activity of the sun, which further suggests there is no compelling reason to believe that the much lesser warmth of today must be due to the atmosphere's elevated CO2 concentration, as it has been significantly warmer than it is currently many times throughout the Holocene when there has been much less CO2 in the air than there is today.

Source Relevant journal abstract below:

THE ROLE OF SOLAR ACTIVITY ON GLACIER LENGTH VARIABILITY IN THE SWISS ALPS

(From Geografiska Annaler, Series A: Physical Geography, Volume 88 Issue 4 Page 281-294, December 2006 )

A geochronological approach to understanding the role of solar activity on Holocene glacier length variability in the Swiss Alps

Anne Hormes et al.

ABSTRACT

We present a radiocarbon data set of 71 samples of wood and peat material that melted out or sheared out from underneath eight presentday mid-latitude glaciers in the Central Swiss Alps. Results indicated that in the past several glaciers have been repeatedly less extensive than they were in the 1990s. The periods when glaciers had a smaller volume and shorter length persisted between 320 and 2500 years. This data set provides greater insight into glacier variability than previously possible, especially for the early and middle Holocene. The radiocarbon-dated periods defined with less extensive glaciers coincide with periods of reduced radio-production, pointing to a connection between solar activity and glacier melting processes. Measured long-term series of glacier length variations show significant correlation with the total solar irradiance. Incoming solar irradiance and changing albedo can account for a direct forcing of the glacier mass balances. Long-term investigations of atmospheric processes that are in interaction with changing solar activity are needed in order to understand the feedback mechanisms with glacier mass balances.




NEW STUDY INCREASES CONCERNS ABOUT CLIMATE MODEL RELIABILITY

A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere. This research, published on-line Wednesday in the Royal Meteorological Society's International Journal of Climatology, raises new concerns about the reliability of models used to forecast global warming. "The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth's climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic," said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. "Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? "It seems that the answer is no."

Scientists from Rochester, the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and the University of Virginia compared the climate change "forecasts" from the 22 most widely-cited global circulation models with tropical temperature data collected by surface, satellite and balloon sensors. The models predicted that the lower atmosphere should warm significantly more than it actually did. "Models are very consistent in forecasting a significant difference between climate trends at the surface and in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere between the surface and the stratosphere," said Dr. John Christy, director of UAH's Earth System Science Center. "The models forecast that the troposphere should be warming more than the surface and that this trend should be especially pronounced in the tropics.

"When we look at actual climate data, however, we do not see accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere. Instead, the lower and middle atmosphere are warming the same or less than the surface. For those layers of the atmosphere, the warming trend we see in the tropics is typically less than half of what the models forecast."

The 22 climate models used in this study are the same models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which recently shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. The atmospheric temperature data were from two versions of data collected by sensors aboard NOAA satellites since late 1979, plus several sets of temperature data gathered twice a day at dozens of points in the tropics by thermometers carried into the atmosphere by helium balloons. The surface data were from three datasets.

After years of rigorous analysis and testing, the high degree of agreement between the various atmospheric data sets gives an equally high level of confidence in the basic accuracy of the climate data. "The last 25 years constitute a period of more complete and accurate observations, and more realistic modeling efforts," said Dr. Fred Singer from the University of Virginia. "Nonetheless, the models are seen to disagree with the observations. We suggest, therefore, that projections of future climate based on these models should be viewed with much caution."

The findings of this study contrast strongly with those of a recent study that used 19 of the same climate models and similar climate datasets. That study concluded that any difference between model forecasts and atmospheric climate data is probably due to errors in the data. "The question was, what would the models `forecast' for upper air climate change over the past 25 years and how would that forecast compare to reality?" said Christy. "To answer that we needed climate model results that matched the actual surface temperature changes during that same time. If the models got the surface trend right but the tropospheric trend wrong, then we could pinpoint a potential problem in the models.

"As it turned out, the average of all of the climate models forecasts came out almost like the actual surface trend in the tropics. That meant we could do a very robust test of their reproduction of the lower atmosphere.

"Instead of averaging the model forecasts to get a result whose surface trends match reality, the earlier study looked at the widely scattered range of results from all of the model runs combined. Many of the models had surface trends that were quite different from the actual trend," Christy said. "Nonetheless, that study concluded that since both the surface and upper atmosphere trends were somewhere in that broad range of model results, any disagreement between the climate data and the models was probably due to faulty data. "We think our experiment is more robust and provides more meaningful results."

Source




Ancient Bone Discovery Debunks Polar Bear Endangerment Fears

'We Don't Have To Be Quite So Worried About The Polar Bear'

Quaternary geologist Professor Dr. Olafur Ingolfsson from the University of Iceland is quoted below.

Excerpt: "We have this specimen that confirms the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago, and this basically means that the polar bear has already survived one interglacial period," explained Professor Ingolfsson. And what's interesting about that is that the Eeemian - the last interglacial - was much warmer than the Holocene (the present). "This is telling us that despite the ongoing warming in the Arctic today, maybe we don't have to be quite so worried about the polar bear. < > That would be very encouraging Professor Ingolfsson is hopeful the bears will cope - and believes the palaeo-record will offer some reassurance. "The polar bear is basically a brown bear that decided some time ago that it would be easier to feed on seals on the ice. So long as there are seals, there are going to be polar bears. I think the threat to the polar bears is much more to do with pollution, the build up of heavy metals in the Arctic. "This is just how I interpret it. But this is science - when you have little data, you have lots of freedom."

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Two very different Warmists meet  -- and we see which is rational

Kevin Trenberth is allegedly a scientist but is certainly a global warming evangelist.  His second most famous quote is:  "The planet is warming", but "the warmth just isn’t being manifested at the surface".   Pielke Jr. says he believes in global warming but doesn't think anyone can do anything about it.  Pielke enrages other Warmists.  He reports via Twitter:

Roger Pielke Jr. @RogerPielkeJr

I debated Trenberth last week. From Kevin there was yelling, spittle & an apology. I stuck to IPCC AR5 which he called totally wrong. Weird.

IPCC AR5 is the latest U.N. climate report





Claim: 'State-of-the-art modeling techniques' reveal that 'Humans Are to Blame for Earth's Rapidly Melting Glaciers'

The paper is Attribution of global glacier mass loss to anthropogenic and natural causes and it is a glaringly obvious piece of propaganda that starts out with a lie. "The ongoing global glacier retreat" doesn't exist. Overall glacier retreat stopped in about 1950. See here. And their failure to include solar factors in their models is also revelatory -- since sunspots have been known for many years as correlated with climate change. And models will give you any result you want of course

The steady melt of glacial ice around the world is largely due to man-made factors, such as greenhouse-gas emissions and aerosols, a new study finds.

Humans have caused roughly a quarter of the globe's glacial loss between 1851 and 2010, and about 69 percent of glacial melting between 1991 and 2010, the study suggests.

"In a sense, we got a confirmation that by now, it is really mostly humans that are responsible for the melting glaciers," said lead researcher Ben Marzeion, an associate professor of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

Vanishing glaciers are often associated with global warming, and other studies have estimated past ice loss and made projections of future melt. But until now, researchers were unsure how much glacial loss was tied to human factors.

"So far, it has been unclear how much of the observed mass losses are caused by humans rather than natural climate variations," Regine Hock, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who was not involved in the study, wrote an in email to Live Science.

The researchers used "state-of-the art modeling techniques," in their work, Hock said.

The research team relied on 12 climate models, most of them from the latest reports from theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of climate-change experts convened by the United Nations. By combining the models, along with data from the Randolph Glacier Inventory (a catalog of nearly 200,000 glaciers), the researchers created a computer model that included only natural contributions to glacier melt, such as volcanic eruptions and solar variability, and another model with both human and natural factors.

Using data from 1851 to 2010, the researchers compared the two models with real measurements of glaciers to determine which one better represented reality. The study did not include glaciers in Antarctica, because not enough data on the region was available during the 159 years covered by the study.

The model with the man-made influences was a better fit, they found.

"Glaciers thin and retreat around the world as a result of rising air temperature, but the glaciers don't care whether or not the increase in temperature is due to natural or human causes," Hock said. "Over the last 150 years, most of the mass loss was due to natural climate variability, caused, for example, by volcanic eruptions or changes in solar activity.

"However, during the last 20 years, almost 70 percent of the glacier mass changes were caused by climate change due to humans," she wrote.

Interestingly, the study found that glaciers, which are slow to react to climate change, are still recovering from the end of the Little Ice Age that lasted from the 14th to the 19th centuries.  During the Little Ice Age, temperatures were about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) colder than they are today.
Warmer temperatures after the Little Ice Age affected the glaciers. "Essentially, what we find is that glaciers would be melting without any human influence," Marzeion told Live Science.

The melt, however, would not be happening as quickly as it is today if it weren't for man-made contributions, such as aerosols from wood or coal fires, he said. Aerosols are particles suspended in the atmosphere that absorb and scatter the sun's radiation.

Even if climate change from both man-made and natural causes stopped today, the glaciers would continue to melt and are projected to raise ocean levels by 2.7 inches (7 centimeters) during this century, Marzeion said.

As global temperatures continue to rise, the glaciers will continue to disappear. The melt may provide more water for irrigation and other needs, but it won't be sustainable because the glaciers may eventually vanish, Marzeion said. In the meantime, people can try to reduce man-made contributions to global warming and adapt to the changing planet, he said.

The study was published online today (Aug. 14) in the journal Science.

SOURCE





The glaciers have stopped retreating

A paper published today in The Cryosphere studies glacier length data available worldwide since 1800 and finds that glaciers retreated faster during the first half of the 20th century than the second half from 1950-2000.

This is the opposite pattern that would be expected if man-made greenhouse gases were the cause, and suggests a natural origin. Most warmists and the IPCC claim man-made greenhouse gases did not begin to affect climate until after 1950, and thus can't be blamed for the fastest rate of glacier retreat from ~1850-1950 and subsequent deceleration.

The authors find glaciers showed little change in length during the latter part of the Little Ice Age 1800-1850, but following the end of the Little Ice Age in ~1850 most began a relatively rapid retreat that began to decelerate after ~1950. The data shows that calving glaciers reversed to a net advancing trend after ~2001, and that the number of calving glaciers  has sharply decreased from ~99% to 50% since the year 2000.

The paper:

A data set of worldwide glacier length fluctuations

P. W. Leclercq et al.

Abstract.

Glacier fluctuations contribute to variations in sea level and historical glacier length fluctuations are natural indicators of past climate change. To study these subjects, long-term information of glacier change is needed. In this paper we present a data set of global long-term glacier length fluctuations. The data set is a compilation of available information on changes in glacier length worldwide, including both measured and reconstructed glacier length fluctuations. All 471 length series start before 1950 and cover at least four decades. The longest record starts in 1535, but the majority of time series start after 1850. The number of available records decreases again after 1962. The data set has global coverage including records from all continents. However, the Canadian Arctic is not represented in the data set. The available glacier length series show relatively small fluctuations until the mid-19th century, followed by a global retreat. The retreat was strongest in the first half of the 20th century, although large variability in the length change of the different glaciers is observed. During the 20th century, calving glaciers retreated more than land-terminating glaciers, but their relative length change was approximately equal. Besides calving, the glacier slope is the most important glacier property determining length change: steep glaciers have retreated less than glaciers with a gentle slope.

SOURCE





Warmists are the climate deniers

An interesting comment by Major Combs on the article above.  Warmists really are pathetic.  Their inability to handle reality shows that they desperately need their mental simplifications

I had the pleasure of discussing glacier retreat with James Balog of "Chasing Ice" fame, and Dr. Robert Bindschadler, retired NASA, on a recent Lindblad/National Geographic Antarctic voyage. Both seemed unknowledgeable about the history of glacier advances and retreats, perhaps because such information did not serve their anthropogenic global warming/climate change agendas. Dr; Bindschadler ridiculed my mention of warmer periods this interglacial, like the Medieval warm period, and denied knowledge of previous sea level high stands, such as during the Holocene Climate Optimum 8,000 to 4,000 years ago. Sadly, it appears that anything that predates Al Gore's alarmism is something that neither gentlemen cared to discuss. I consider both of them to be natural climate change deniers.




Bill Nye, Al Gore Get The Physics Of Global Warming Wrong

Critics are saying Bill Nye “the science guy” and former Vice President Al Gore got their global warming science wrong, citing previously published research.

Back in 2011, Nye and Gore teamed up to show that global warming was real using “a simple lab experiment.” The problem is that such experiments have been discredited by scientists who the say these demonstrations show heat transport, not global warming.

“Although not an accurate demonstration of the physics of climate change, the experiment we have considered and related ones are valuable examples of the dangers of unintentional bias in science, the value of at least a rough quantitative prediction of the expected effect, the importance of considering alternative explanations, and the need for carefully designed experimental controls,” according to a paper by scientists from Tufts and the Technical Education Research Centers.

During a 2011 “24 hours of climate reality” by the Climate Reality Project, a group founded by Gore to sound the alarm on global warming, Nye put together a “Climate Change 101” video which used “a simple lab experiment” to demonstrate how increasing levels of carbon dioxide emissions heat the planet.

Nye’s “simple” experiment involved sealing thermometers inside two identical bottles, which were sealed. To illustrate the effects of increased carbon dioxide on temperature, Nye fits a hose from a CO2 canister into one of the bottles. Both bottles are then placed placed under heat lamps.

“Within minutes you will see the temperature of the bottle with carbon dioxide in it rising faster and higher,” Nye said in his video experiment. “The bottles are like our atmosphere, the lamps are like our sun.”

A paper published in a 2010 edition of the American Journal of Physics found that experiments like Nye’s are “not an accurate demonstration of the physics of climate change.”

These experiments have not just been reproduced by Nye, but by scientists and teachers around the country to illustrate the cause of global warming in a simple, easy to understand way. But they all suffer a fatal flaw: they illustrate “processes related to convective heat transport that plays no role in climate change.”

“All involve comparing the temperature rise in a container filled with air with that of the same or a similar container filled with carbon dioxide when exposed to radiation from the Sun or a heat lamp,” the scientists wrote. “Typically, a larger temperature rise is observed with carbon dioxide and the difference is attributed, explicitly or implicitly, to the physical phenomena responsible for the climate change.”

“We argue here that great care is required in interpreting these demonstrations. … The results arise primarily from processes related to convective heat transport that plays no role in climate change,” the paper continues.

“The greater density of carbon dioxide compared to air reduces heat transfer by suppressing convective mixing with the ambient air,” the scientists continued. “Other related experiments are subject to similar concerns. Argon, which has a density close to that of carbon dioxide but no infrared absorption, provides a valuable experimental control for separating radiative from convective effects.”

Nye’s “Climate Change 101″ video is still featured prominently on the Climate Reality Project’s website, along with content that sounds the alarm on global warming and bashes those skeptical that man-made carbon dioxide is warming the planet.

“Take Climate 101 with Bill Nye (the Science Guy) and you’ll be schooled in the scientific fundamentals of climate change in under 5 minutes,” Climate Reality Project’s website reads.

“Separate fact from fiction, and we can end the debate and denial and move on to solutions, together,” the site adds.

SOURCE





Wind farm 'needs 700 times more land' than fracking site to produce same energy

A wind farm requires 700 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as a fracking site, according to analysis by the energy department’s recently-departed chief scientific advisor.

Prof David MacKay, who stood down from the Government role at the end of July, published analysis putting shale gas extraction “in perspective”, showing it was far less intrusive on the landscape than wind or solar energy.

His intervention was welcomed by fracking groups, who are battling to win public support amid claims from green groups and other critics that shale gas extraction will require the “industrialisation” of the countryside.

Hundreds of anti-fracking protesters on Thursday occupied a field near Blackpool neighbouring a proposed fracking site for energy firm Cuadrilla.

Prof MacKay said that a shale gas site uses less land and “creates the least visual intrusion”, compared with a wind farm or solar farm capable of producing the equivalent amount of energy over 25 years.

He rated each technology’s “footprint” against six criteria covering aspects of land use, height, visual impact and truck movements to and from the site.

The shale gas site or “pad” was the “winning” technology on three measures, solar farms won on two, while wind farms did not win any. None was deemed to have “won” on truck movements as all types generated “lots” of traffic.

Prof MacKay, who is Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, said that a shale gas pad of 10 wells would require just 2 hectares of land and would be visible - due to an 85-foot-high drilling rig - from 77 hectares of surrounding area. However, the drilling rig would be in place for "only the first few years of operations".

By contrast, a wind farm capable of producing the same energy would span an area of 1,450 hectares, requiring 87 turbines each 328-foot tall.

Prof MacKay noted that the actual turbines, access roads and other installations for the wind farm would have a smaller footprint, of 36 hectares, as “the wind farm has lots of empty land between the turbines, which can be used for other purposes”.

But the large area covered by the farm as a whole would mean it would be visible from a surrounding area of between 5,200 and 17,000 hectares.

A solar farm generating equivalent energy would span a 924 hectare area, directly building on 208 hectares of it.

An estimated 7,800 lorry movements would be required for the wind farm and between 3,800 and 7,600 for the solar farm.

The fracking site could require the fewest lorry movements, at 2,900, if water is piped to and from the site. However, it could require significantly more than the other technologies - 20,000 trips - if water was transported by truck.

Prof MacKay said the analysis showed that “perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no silver bullet – no energy source with all-round small environmental impact”. He said that all sources “have their costs and risks” and said the public should “look at all the options”.

A spokesman for Cuadrilla said: "This comparison by David MacKay clearly demonstrates that, contrary to what some people may assume, exploration for and production of shale gas would actually have less far less impact on the countryside than wind or solar energy.

"To supply an equivalent amount of energy a shale gas site would occupy just a small fraction of the land required for either wind or solar sites, would have less visual intrusion and significantly less transport impact, given that in the UK we do not anticipate having to truck water to our proposed sites."

Ken Cronin, chief executive of the UK Onshore Operators Group, which represents fracking firms, said: "David MacKay’s review is a useful addition to the debate. We are going to need all these energy sources to be part of a balanced energy mix.

"We mustn’t ignore the fact that over 80 per cent of homes and businesses are heated by gas. As an industry we are committed to informing and consulting fully with the communities in which we operate."

Dr Jimmy Aldridge, energy analyst for Greenpeace UK, said: “The visual impact of fracking isn’t really the main issue – everyone knows that wind turbines are taller than drilling rigs, so you can see them from further away, but government figures show three times as many people support wind power than shale gas, and that difference just gets more pronounced when it’s in their local area.

"That’s partly because of the risk of localised air and water pollution, partly noise and inconvenience, but most importantly, because shale gas is a high-carbon energy source, which is exactly what we need a lot less of.”

The Department of Energy and Climate Change caused controversy last autumn when it published and then deleted from its website a graphic showing that onshore wind farms covering 250,000 acres would be required to generate as much power as the proposed Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset, which would cover 430 acres.

SOURCE

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

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

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Media Blames ‘Climate Change’ For Loss Of Venezuelan Glacier

Did you know that Venezuela’s last glacier was just demoted to an icefield? Or that this tropical, nearly equatorial, nation even had glaciers?

Well, it was and it did.

A reader asked us how to answer an alarmist claim that the demotion proves there’s a man-made ‘global heating crisis’, which of course is being bleated in unison by the herd of ‘independent’ media minds around the world.

None of whom of course hitherto knew or cared that said glacier even existed until it afforded this week’s opportunity to bang the climate apocalypse drum.

To which we said, as we usually do, check how long it’s been melting, because as a rule, the shrinking of glaciers demonstrates not that man is warming the planet but that the planet is warming man.

Then, and yes in true scientific fashion, we checked it ourselves to see if our hypothesis was sound. Si señor. It most certainly is.

The thing’s been melting since before World War I, most of the melting happened before World War II, and whenever the man-made ‘climate breakdown’ thingy hit, surely it wasn’t 1938.

The ex-glacier in question is the Humboldt Glacier, “struggling for survival in the Sierra Nevada National Park” according to the Times of India. Brave glacier! (And not to be confused with Greenland’s “Humboldt Glacier“.)

Mind you the South American one is not going to make it, given that Venezuela is not merely tropical but very nearly touches the equator, and is not a major mountaineering destination because its highest one, Pico Bolívar (not to be confused with Colombia’s Pico Simón Bolívar, a massive 5,730 meters high) tops out at just under 5,000 meters above sea level (4,978) and the ice field in question is on Pico Humboldt (please give now to alleviate the name shortage) at 4,925 meters.

Not where you’d store your ice if you cared about it.

Euronews.green complains that:

“Venezuela has lost its last glacier, making it the first nation in modern history to hold this unenviable record.

At least five other glaciers have disappeared in the South American country within the last century as climate change drives up temperatures in the Andes.

The country lost 98 per cent of its glacial area between 1952 and 2019, research shows.”

Note again that climate change is some weird mystical thing that surrounds us and penetrates us and causes temperatures to rise. It is not a description of them doing so. And of course when “research shows” mere citizens fall silent.

Despite this we did go and look at the actual research and, persevering down to Figure 5, found this map proving we were completely right all along and these journalists don’t know how to fact-check:

It’s a nice piece of work graphically speaking, with bright colors easy to follow, based on a reconstruction of the various glaciers going back to 1910, and the key here is that all the purple stuff is what melted between 1910 and 1952.

Big splotches, aren’t they? And look at the other two areas: they were half gone by 1952 and dwindled to specks or vanished by 1998, a full 26 years ago (the blue stuff being what vanished between 1952 and 1998).

Showing crucially that major melting started over a century ago, at a minimum.

We don’t know what happened before 1910 because ice doesn’t leave much in the way of a fossil record.

The pattern of Venezuelan glaciers is not anomalous. Rather, all glaciers have been retreating for centuries, with most of the melting predating the recent past.

Where we know in more detail, most of it happened before the 19th century. For instance, look at the map of Alaska’s famed glaciers published by W.S. Cooper in 1923 (below) and compare the ice extent in Alaska’s Muir Inlet as of 1880, compared to 1916.

Or the Reid and Torr inlets from 1879 to 1916:

Or, for a prettier version, look at this 2013 brochure given to one of us when we visited:

Look at the ice in 1750 and 1880, and then from 1880 to today. There was some mighty ‘climate change’ back in George Washington’s day, that’s for sure.

But not by us and our horse-drawn buggies. As is also true of the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand, in case anyone tries to tell you the Little Ice Age was regional.

All of this does not prove that something weird started in 1958, 1988, or 2000, or whatever the alarmists currently claim. On the contrary, it proves the exact opposite.

We are in a long-term warming trend that is overwhelmingly natural unless you believe that human CO2 not only causes artificial heating but shuts off the natural kind through some hitherto unknown process incompatible with the laws of physics and chemistry as we know them.

People get it wrong all the time because they’re so dogmatically certain that they do not check either facts or reasoning.

As we noted back in 2020, claims that the shrinking of France’s largest glacier was “irrefutable proof of global warming” were dead wrong.

It was the opposite.

The glacier had grown dramatically in the 18th century, peaked around 1850, and then shrank dramatically.

Glacier disappearance goes back much farther than 1800, too. As one paper safely published back in 1992 put it, concerning Hannibal’s apparently eccentric decision to bring elephants through the Alps:

“By the 3rd century BC the Alpine glaciers were in a backward position compared with their position in 900-350 BC.

This fact and the mildness of the climate, inferred from tree-ring analyses, suggest that ice conditions were not severe in the Alps in 218 BC.”

And the two main primary sources, Livy and Polybius, stress the appalling geography of whichever pass or passes he used but do not mention ice or glaciers. So possibly some countries that now have at least residual glaciers did not then.

Which again rather proves our point.

Nowadays everybody’s so sure of the opposite that they find it whether it’s there or not.

The research that says claims that:

“Glacier retreat in mountainous regions has accelerated worldwide within the last fifty years, triggering efforts to document what will soon become legacy landscapes (Barry 2006; Zemp et al. 2015; Huss et al. 2017).

In the tropical Andes, the rate of glacier retreat after 1950 is above the world’s average, with a notable increase after 1970 (Rabatel et al. 2013; Veettil and Kamp 2017).”

And nobody saw it coming that the place they were studying would be going up in flames faster than the average. But the rest of the statement is also nonsense.

They have no idea what the rate of retreat of the glaciers in this region was before 1900 so they can’t compare it to the present.

Besides what “rate” are they talking about? Distance? Volume? Percentage? If the latter it’s a cheat, because of course as it gets smaller, the rate of percentage decrease will accelerate.

But as we’ve shown before, only an insane person would maintain that the rate of glacier retreat in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park was slower 200 years ago than recently, or that it doesn’t have mountains.

Wikipedia predictably claims that:

“Most of New Zealand’s large glaciers shrank significantly towards the end of the 20th century, a consequence of global warming.”

But after that ritual genuflection, it blurts out that:

“Franz Josef Glacier advanced rapidly during the Little Ice Age, reaching a maximum in the early 18th century.

When Haast became the first European to see the glacier it was still much longer than today, and the ice surface was 300 m higher.

Between its first official mapping in 1893 and a century later in 1983, Franz Josef Glacier retreated 3 km up the valley.”

Note the “still”. That mapping was in 1893 and it had already retreated an enormous distance.

Like the Humboldt, it responded to natural warming long ago, and the fact that it still is doesn’t mean the warming suddenly started recently or changed its nature and cause.

It means it’s a continuation of a long, natural, cyclical rebound from the Little Ice Age.

https://principia-scientific.com/media-blames-climate-change-for-loss-of-venezuelan-glacier/

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Guardian Removes Article Claiming Renewables are Cheap

Regular readers of my Substack might recall that back in April, I wrote an article rebutting a blatant piece of propaganda that appeared in an advertorial in the Guardian, paid for by the National Grid.

I complained to both the Guardian and the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and there is both good news and bad news to report.

The good news is the ASA appear to have taken a dim view of the article. Its response noted that the article has now been removed from the Guardian’s website and it said:

We have decided to resolve your complaint through the provision of advice to the advertiser. Therefore, we have explained the concerns raised to the advertiser and provided it with guidance on how to ensure that its advertising complies with the Codes both now and in future.

It is not clear whether the withdrawal of the article is related to the “advice” it gave or whether it is merely a coincidence. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that renewables are an expensive source of power and false claims can no longer be made in the press.

I think we should chalk this up as some sort of victory.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/06/04/guardian-removes-article-claiming-renewables-are-cheap-as-advertising-watchdog-signals-false-claims-will-not-be-tolerated/

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New Survey Reveals Just How Unmotivated Americans Are To Purchase EVs

The Biden administration is aggressively pushing electric vehicles (EVs) on Americans, but consumers do not seem to be especially enthused about buying them, according to a new poll.

While 46% of respondents indicated that they are unlikely or very unlikely to purchase an EV, 21% said that they are “very” or “extremely” likely to purchase an EV for their next vehicle, and 21% said they are “somewhat” likely to buy an EV, according to the results of a new poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule in March that will require EVs to make up 56% of all new car sales on top of 13% for plug-in hybrids or partially electric models come 2032.

Respondents who are not inclined to purchase an EV identified several issues motivating their skepticism, according to the results of the AP’s poll. About half of adults point to concerns about EVs’ range as a major reason for not buying one, while approximately 40% identify charging time or uncertainty about nearby charging stations as problems. (RELATED: Biden Says That Americans Can Buy Any Car They Want. His Admin Is Forcing EVs To Be Huge Share Of Sales By 2032)

The Biden administration is spending $7.5 billion to help build out a national network of EV charging infrastructure, but those funds have only produced a handful of operational charging stations to date. The nation’s charging systems remain concentrated mostly in densely-populated coastal regions, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).

New EVs cost $52,314 on average as of February, according to the AP, while the average gas-powered compact crossover sets buyers back approximately $35,722, according to Edmunds. Nearly 60% of adults also cite the cost of EVs as a major reason not to get one.

Interest in EVs also varies by age, with more than half of respondents under the age of 45 indicating that they are at least “somewhat” likely to think about buying an EV compared to about 32% of respondents over the age of 45, according to the poll’s results.

The poll sampled 6,265 adults between March 26 and April 1o using a combination of interviews and online panels, according to the AP. The poll’s margin of error was 1.7%.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/06/04/biden-electric-vehicles-american-consumers-poll/

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UK: Labour’s energy claims are ‘divorced from reality’

The Labour Party is saying that its energy policies – a rapid decarbonisation of the electricity system – will save consumers money. The claim is apparently based on an October 2023 report by Ember,[1] which says that a decarbonised electricity system can reduce bills by £300 per household.

However, the report also says[2] that the authors are assuming that windfarms in the future will secure ‘the same price as [Contracts for Difference] auction round 4’. The prices achieved in Round 4 (£37.50) are around half the price (£73/MWh) currently on offer to offshore windfarms in Round 6 [3]. And industry insiders are suggesting that even the latter figure may be inadequate.[4]

In other words, Labour’s savings rely on assuming that wind power costs half of what it actually does.

A second problem Labour’s putative savings figure is that Ember’s report compares bills in their hypothetical decarbonised electricity system against bills in the third quarter of 2023, which were still inflated by the Ukraine war.

Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:

Labour’s claim of a reduction in household bills is based on figures that are entirely divorced from today’s reality.
And Mr Montford continued by calling for a new reality-based debate on Net Zero.

When it comes to energy policy, the political establishment is operating in a fact-free void. For the sake of the country, they need to start asking very hard questions about what they are being told by civil servants and environmental activists like Ember.

https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/labour-divorced-from-reality

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Fastest-Thinning Greenland Glacier Threw NASA Scientists for a Loop. It's Actually Growing

Due to "temporary" factors, of course.  How do we know that its previous thinning was not also due to "temporary" factors? The fact that they didn't predict the cooling means that they don't understand or know all the temperature factors at work.  They are just guessing and being wise after the event.  The previous thinning could have been due to subsurface vulcanism.  if not, why not?

Greenland's fastest-flowing and fastest-thinning glacier recently threw a real brain bender at scientists, who realized that instead of shrinking, the glacier is actually growing thicker, they reported in a new study.

The glacier — known as Jakobshavn, which sits on Greenland's west coast — is still contributing to sea level rise, but it's losing less ice than expected. Instead of thinning and retreating inland, its ice is thickening and advancing toward the ocean, the researchers found.

After much sleuthing, a team of scientists from the United States and the Netherlands found that the glacier is likely growing due to colder ocean currents. In 2016, a current that passes by Jakobshavn Glacier was cooler than usual, making waters near the glacier the coldest they'd been since the mid-1980s.

This cooler current came from the North Atlantic Ocean, more than 600 miles (966 kilometers) south of the glacier, according to data from NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission and other observations.

The finding took the scientists completely by surprise. "At first, we didn't believe it," study lead researcher Ala Khazendar, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years." But the cold water isn't a one-off. Data from OMG shows that the water has been cold now for three years in a row.

It appears that the cold water is the result of a climate pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which makes the northern Atlantic Ocean slowly switch between warm and cold water about once every 20 years, the researchers said. The cold phase just recently started, and has cooled the Atlantic Ocean in general, they said. In addition, some extra cooling of the waters around Greenland's southwest coast helped keep the glacier chilly.

But this crisp change won't last forever. Once the NAO climate pattern flips back, the Jakobshavn will likely start melting faster and thinning again, the researchers said.

"Jakobshavn is getting a temporary break from this climate pattern," Josh Willis, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the principal investigator of OMG, said in the statement. "But in the long run, the oceans are warming. And seeing the oceans have such a huge impact on the glaciers is bad news for Greenland's ice sheet."

Scientists have watched Jakobshavn with concern for decades. After losing its ice shelf in the early 2000s (an ice shelf forces a glacier to flow more slowly into the ocean, like dirt clogging a drain), Jakobshavn began losing ice at an alarming rate. Between 2003 and 2016, its thickness (from top to bottom) dwindled by 500 feet (152 meters).

But in 2016, the waters flowing from Greenland's southern tip to its western side cooled by more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius). Meanwhile, the NAO climate pattern caused the Atlantic Ocean near Greenland to cool by about 0.5 F (1 C) between 2013 and 2016. By the summer of 2016, these cooler waters reached the glacier, and they are likely the reason that Jakobshavn slowed its rate of ice loss to the ocean, the researchers said. [Image: Greenland's Dramatic Landscape]

In all, Jakobshavn grew about 100 feet (30 m) taller between 2016 and 2017, the researchers found. But, as mentioned, the glacier is still contributing to ocean level rise worldwide, as it's still losing more ice to the ocean than it is gaining from snow accumulation, the researchers said.

The findings shed light on how much ocean temperatures can affect glacier growth, said Tom Wagner, a NASA Headquarters program scientist for the cryosphere, the frozen part of Earth.

"The OMG mission deployed new technologies that allowed us to observe a natural experiment, much as we would do in a laboratory, where variations in ocean temperatures were used to control the flow of a glacier," Wagner, who was not involved in the study, said in the statement. "Their findings — especially about how quickly the ice responds — will be important to projecting sea level rise in both the near and distant future."

SOURCE




Snow Lizards, Seahorses, and Reagan on a Dinosaur: Sen. Lee Mocks Green New Deal

Armed with images of a gun-toting, dinosaur-mounted Ronald Reagan, a snow lizard and giant seahorse, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) had some fun at the expense of Democratic colleagues on Tuesday, but made clear that it was their “Green New Deal,” not climate change, that was the butt of his jokes.

Lee’s speech and accompanying visuals came before the Senate voted against advancing a resolution “recognizing the duty of the federal government to create a Green New Deal.”

In what Democrats condemned as a “stunt,” every Republican voted against the resolution, put forward by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in a bid to force Democrats to take a public stand on an initiative which he called “a radical, top-down, socialist makeover of the entire U.S. economy.”

The Republicans were joined by three Democrats – Sens. Doug Jones (Ala.), Joe Manchin (W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) – and independent Angus King (Me.), while the remainder of the Democrats, including the declared 2020 presidential candidates, voted “present.”

The vote count was 0 yeas, 57 nays, and 43 voting present.

“The GOP’s climate delaying is costing us lives + destroying communities,” Green New Deal champion Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted afterwards. She also said she and others had encouraged Senate Democrats to vote “present,” adding that McConnell had tried to rush the initiative “straight to the floor without a hearing.”

Lee opened his speech – social media opinions on which ranged from “bizarre” to “masterful” – by saying he was going to “consider the Green New Deal with the seriousness it deserves.”

The image of Reagan on a “velociraptor holding up a tattered American flag,” he said, was meant to depict a “climactic battle of the Cold War,” although in real life, “the Cold War, as we all know, was won without firing a shot.”

“This image has as much to do with overcoming communism in the 20th century as the Green New Deal has to do with overcoming climate change in the 21st.”

Lee later presented images of a Tauntaun snow lizard of Star Wars fame – a suggested carbon-neutral mode of winter transport for citizens of Alaska “in a future without air travel” – and an animated Aquaman riding a giant seahorse as the corresponding option for citizens of Hawaii.

He went on to talk about the elimination of America’s cows – considered a problem because they emit methane, a greenhouse gas.

A Green New Deal “frequently asked questions” document from Ocasio-Cortez’ office earlier this year called for the building of “high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”

It also referred to bovine flatulence: “We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.”

Eliminating air travel and cows were not included in the actual Green New Deal resolution subsequently introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) – which in replicated form was what was voted on in the Senate on Tuesday.

Instead, the resolution calls for investment in “high-speed rail” as part of that envisaged transportation overhaul – with no reference to air travel – and refers to efforts “to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible.”

Lee said the initiative’s authors hearing his speech will protest that the goals of eliminating air travel and cows are not actually part of the GND but “merely were included in supporting documents accidentally sent out by the office of the lead sponsor in the House of Representatives.”

“This only makes my point: The supporters of the Green New Deal want Americans to trust them to reorganize our entire society, our entire economy, to restructure our very way of life – when they couldn’t even figure out how to send out the right press release.”

The GND was not an agenda of solutions, he charged, but “a token of elite tribal identity, and endorsing it a public act of piety for the chic and ‘woke.’”

The solution to climate change, he said, was not the Green New Deal – but “babies.”

“Climate change is an engineering problem—not social engineering, but the real kind. It’s a challenge of creativity, ingenuity and, most of all, technological innovation.”

Lee quoted Tyler Cowen, economics professor at George Mason University, as having written recently: “By having more children, you’re making your nation more populous, thus boosting its capacity to solve climate change.”

“The solution to climate change,” Lee concluded, “is not this unserious resolution we’re considering this week in the Senate, but rather the serious business of human flourishing. The solution to so many of our problems, at all times and in all places, is to fall in love, get married, and have some kids.”

Reacting to Lee’s speech, Markey tweeted later, “When the Midwest is flooded and people have died because of climate-related extreme weather, it is shameful to joke about climate change. This is exactly Democrats’ point – Republicans only want to make a mockery of the climate crisis. We will not let them.”

SOURCE





‘White People’ blamed for causing Cyclone Idai in Africa

One can't blame Mr Mngxitama for his views.  He is just repeating what Warmists say

“White people” are being blamed for causing “climate change” which is claimed to have led to a deadly hurricane in Africa, according to the activist group Black First Land First (BLF).

BLF blamed Tropical Cyclone Idai on “white people” and is demanding that the African Union seek reparations the West for the hurricane.

BLF president Andile Mngxitama declared that the cyclone that hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, was “not a natural disaster but a direct consequence of the white, Western system of ecological assault for profits.”

This (cyclone) is mass murder which could be prevented if the West abandoned its ways,” Mngxitama stated. “It’s no longer speculation – even the white man’s own science corroborates what we blacks know: Africa is paying a heavy price for the actions of the white world,” he added with a reference to “climate change” science allegedly causing increase in extreme weather

SOURCE







Interesting Stats on Electric Cars

The electrical energy to keep the batteries charged has to come from the grid and that means more power generation and a huge increase in the distribution infrastructure.  Whether generated from coal, gas, oil, wind or sun, installed generation capacity is limited.

If electric cars do not use gasoline, they will not participate in paying a gasoline tax on every gallon that is sold for automobiles, which was enacted some years ago to help to maintain our roads and bridges.  They will use the roads, but will not pay for their maintenance!

In case you were thinking of buying a hybrid or an electric car:

Ever since the advent of electric cars, the REAL cost per mile of those things has never been discussed.  All you ever heard was the mpg in terms of gasoline, with nary a mention of the cost of electricity to run it.

If you really intend to adopt electric vehicles, you had to face certain realities.  For example, a home charging system for a Tesla requires 75 amp services.  The average house is equipped with 100 amp service.  On our small street (approximately 25 homes), the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla, each.  For even half the homes to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly over-loaded.

This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles.  Our residential infrastructure cannot bear the load.  So as our genius elected officials promote this nonsense, not only are we being urged to buy these things and replace our reliable, cheap generating systems with expensive, new windmills and solar cells, but we will also have to renovate our entire delivery system.

Eric test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors and he writes, "For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine ."  Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg including the 25 miles it ran on the battery.  So, the range including the 9-gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh batteries is approximately 270 miles.

It will take you 4.5 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph.  Then add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip time of 14.5 hours.  In a typical road trip, your average speed (including charging time) would be 20 mph.

According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kWh of electricity.  It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery.  The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned, so I looked up what I pay for electricity.   I pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kWh.  16 kWh x $1.16 per kWh = $18.56 to charge the battery.  $18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery.  Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32 mpg.   $3.19 per gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile.

Update: the $1.16 above may be wrong. 11.6c is more likely

The gasoline-powered car costs about $20,000 while the Volt costs $46,000-plus.  So the American Government wants loyal Americans not to do the math, but simply pay three times as much for a car, that costs more than seven times as much to run, and takes three times longer to drive across the country.

Various sources





The Greens' extraordinary plan to BAN coal in Australia - calling it 'the new asbestos - despite exports earning $66BILLION every year

They know there is no hope of this being enacted.  It is just an attempt to make themselves look good and wise

The Greens have unveiled their radical plan to ban coal despite it bringing Australia more than $66billion every year.

The party on Thursday released a new climate plan, which sets 2030 as the target year for the nation to be running on 100 per cent renewable energy.

The policy - which comes with a call to arms from Swedish school student Greta Thunberg - shows how the Greens would push a Labor government if elected in May.

Greens leader Richard Di Natale described coal as 'the new asbestos', saying the party wants to shut down every coal power plant in New South Wales, The Daily Telegraph reported.

'We once used asbestos in our buildings because we thought it was safe. But we now know better, so we have banned it. Now it is coal's turn,' the Greens' policy stated.

The party wants to put an end to thermal coal burning by setting a yearly limit on coal exports from 2020 and reducing it every year until it hits zero in 2030.

At the same time, the party is pushing for the nation to be running on 100 per cent renewable energy by the time the coal industry ceases trading.

The plan would include a $65billion carbon tax, and an immediate ban on new coal mines, fracking and conventional onshore and offshore gas and oilfields.

Industry experts said the economy will suffer under the plan.

Coal was the highest earning export commodity in Australia last year, accounting for $66million in revenue, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures.   

Last financial year, coals exports brought the NSW economy about $17billion, with thermal coal exports reaching 164.6million tonnes.

NSW Mining CEO Stephen Galilee told Daily Mail Australia the overall economic cost of banning coal would send the state into a deep economic recession.

'The Greens policy would cost NSW its most valuable export industry and over $17billion in export income, as well as over $2billion a year in mining royalties, which help pay for schools and hospitals.

'Over 20,000 NSW coal miners would lose their jobs, devastating mining families and communities, and over 130,000 more jobs across NSW would also be potentially affected,' Mr Galilee said.

The CEO said more than 7,000 businesses currently part of the mining supply chain would also be hit, threatening even more jobs.

'Electricity supply to families and businesses across NSW would also be at risk of price rises and blackouts which would affect a range of energy-intensive industries including manufacturing, transport and construction,' he said.

Mr Di Natale has denied his party's plan to shut down all coal-fired power stations and phase out thermal coal exports will cost Australians jobs.

The Greens want a $1billion transition plan for workers affected by banning coal, which Mr Di Natale believes will create more than 170,000 new jobs.

'We will lose no jobs because under our plan we will have a national authority, a publicly-owned authority, with express intent to manage this transition,' he told ABC Radio National on Thursday.

'The reality is this is happening already, people are going to lose their jobs because the economics are making it so.'

Mr Di Natale said unlike the major parties, the Greens planned to create a jobs boom in the renewable energy export industry.

As part of the plan, the Greens want the nation to stop using gas - despite experts saying the energy source is an essential part of future energy sources.

Phasing out petrol cars and moving to electric vehicles was another key objective mentioned in the Greens idealistic plan. 

Luxury fossil fuel cars would be hit with a 17 per cent tax to help pay for scrapping registration fees, import tariffs, GST and stamp duty on electric vehicles.

The Greens have also proposed establishing a new public energy retailer and re-regulating electricity prices to address price gouging following the coal ban.

Mr Di Natale said the mining and burning of coal remained the single biggest cause of climate change in Australia and around the world.

'You need the Greens in the Senate to push Labor to make sure we do what needs to be done,' he said.

SOURCE 

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

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

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‘Doomsday Glacier’ hanging on ‘by its fingernails’ in Antarctica, scientists say

Warmists have been prophecying ice-sheet collapse for years but nothing significant ever happens.

And if the Thwaites glacier did detach it is unlikely to be due to global warming. It is located in West Antarctica, where there is a lot of subsurface vulcanism. The collapse is said to be coming from below not from the top down. And that suggests vulcanism

A glacier three times the size of Tasmania is hanging on “by its fingernails”, scientists have warned.

Thwaites Glacier — otherwise known as the “Doomsday glacier,” due to the fact it could raise the sea level by several metres — is allegedly hanging on “by its fingernails”.

Scientists discovered that the glacier’s underwater base has been eroding due to the increase in the Earth’s temperature, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience.

“Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails,” said Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist who co-authored the study.

“And we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future — even from one year to the next — once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed.”

West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is roughly three times the size of Tasmania and could potentially raise the sea level should it fall into the ocean, which scientists predicted could happen within the next three years.

NASA said the Amundsen Sea region, which is “only a fraction of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet,” would “raise global sea level by about 5m”.

Researchers have monitored the glacier’s recession since “as recently as the mid-20th century,” according to lead author Alastair Graham, and have recorded a disintegration rate of nearly double since the last decade.

Earlier this year, an international group of scientists attempted to study the glacier in an effort to help stop the erosion, however, the group was thwarted by a chunk of ice from the doomed glacier.

Graham stated that it “was truly a once-in-a-lifetime mission” and he hopes that the team will be able to return to the glacier soon — since scientists believed the erosion was working at a slower pace before the study was published.

“Just a small kick to the Thwaites could lead to a big response,” said Graham

https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/doomsday-glacier-hanging-on-by-its-fingernails-in-antarctica-scientists-say/news-story/51d35959fa818dab60811b19c362d5b9

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California’s electricity woes offer a taste of a possible future green-energy nightmare

California has become an example of what a state looks like when it is controlled by a single party — in this case Democrats, who are trying to impose a green-energy secular religion on their people.

State officials have banned the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, but a preview of the nightmare that could occur in the near future is happening now.

Facing a heat wave this week and the high chances of rolling blackouts, Californians are being told to turn up the temperature on air conditioners to at least 78 degrees and not charge their electric cars on Sunday afternoons and evenings. If there isn’t enough electricity to charge the current number of electric cars in California (estimated by the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom to be “1 million plug-in electric cars, pickup trucks, SUVs and motorcycles), how much confidence should Californians place in the availability of electricity in 2035 and beyond?

There are approximately 29 million cars, light trucks and motorcycles in the state. By some estimates it will take 15 years to fully transition to all electric vehicles. Currently, reports the Associated Press, California has about 80,000 re-charging stations in public places, “far short of the 250,000 it wants by 2025.”

CalMatters columnist Dan Walters gets to the heart of the problem for electric-car enthusiasts: “Let’s say someone living in San Francisco wanted to drive to Lake Tahoe for skiing. A 150-mile range would not even cover a one-way trip. The solution might be lots of recharging stations along interregional highways, but whereas a fill-up of gasoline might take 10 minutes, recharging electric cars now takes much longer. Is California willing to build the hundreds of thousands of recharging stations a complete conversion to battery-powered cars would require? Could Californians drive their mandated [zero-emission vehicles] into other states without running out of juice?”

There are other concerns, such as the cost of EVs, the life of batteries and the high cost of replacing them, the source of lithium from countries that are poor practitioners of human rights, as well as where all the required new electricity will come from (mainly fossil fuels now, though greenies think costly and ugly windmills, wind and solar sources can produce sufficient power, which is unlikely). There is little consideration for increasing the availability of nuclear power, again because of the left’s antipathy toward that clean energy source.

Then there is the premise on which “climate change” is based. It is more political than logical. With China and India still producing the most CO2, will electric cars in America address the perceived problem? Not according to David Kelly, academic director of the Master of Science in Sustainable Business Program at the University of Miami: “You have to think about what is the lowest cost way to get where we want to go. So, if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions or other pollutants, then electric vehicles are unlikely to be that.” Kelly drives a Tesla.

California is ordering its people to abandon choice when it comes to transportation in favor of expensive electric vehicles that are unlikely to provide the freedom they now enjoy with their gasoline-powered cars, all because of a secular faith that claims to know best what is good for us.

https://nypost.com/2022/09/09/californias-electricity-woes-offer-insight-to-green-energy-nightmare/

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UK: Fracking shares rocket after Truss lifts drill ban unlocking what are thought to be huge reserves of shale gas under the UK

Shares in fracking companies soared after the Prime Minister lifted the ban on drilling for shale gas onshore.

In her second day in office, Liz Truss lifted a moratorium which came into force in November 2019 amid fears fracking caused minor earthquakes or tremors.

Companies can now apply for planning permission to frack what are thought to be huge reserves of shale gas under the UK.

Investors have anticipated the move as shares in AIM-listed Egdon have more than doubled since the start of August.

Managing director Mark Abbott praised the Prime Minister’s decision as the ‘logical and pragmatic response to the new geopolitical reality’.

‘With Egdon’s material shale-gas position, we look forward to working positively with government and local communities to deliver this nationally important resource in a timely fashion,’ he said

IGas Energy, meanwhile, which was founded in 2003, said the UK’s ‘world-class shale gas resource’ is now a ‘strategic national asset’ given the ongoing energy crisis.

Boss Stephen Bowler said the decision would improve the UK’s energy security, to increase tax take and provide a means to level up the economy.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/market-report-fracking-shares-rocket-after-truss-lifts-drill-ban-unlocking-what-are-thought-to-be-huge-reserves-of-shale-gas-under-the-uk/ar-AA11Cv0f

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Conservatives Are Mastering the Art of the Proxy Ballot to Fight ESG

For decades, getting a proposal on a company’s proxy ballot, the mainstay of shareholder democracy, had been used by corporate gadflies to try to pressure boards into taking controversial positions. More recently, fund management giants have pushed companies into adopting environmental and social changes through the proxy ballot—the document that publicly traded companies mail to shareholders to cast votes ahead of annual meetings. This year, 272 such measures made it onto company proxies, up from 158 in 2021.

Now conservative groups are getting into the game, led by two little-known strategists who have mastered the art of the proxy ballot. Coincidentally, the US Securities and Exchange Commission is helping to pave their way with important rule changes. “As corporations are making more and more decisions that conservatives feel cater to the left, then [conservatives are] going to not just make more noise about this but be more organized,” says Doug Heye, a Republican strategist and former communications director of the Republican National Committee.

One of the two activists, Scott Shepard, could be seen in February delivering a jeremiad against what he called “Woke Inc.” at a Florida Conservative Political Action Conference convention. Shepard, who leads the Free Enterprise Project at the Washington-based National Center for Public Policy Research, exhorted attendees to put corporate America on the defensive for championing ideas on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Shepard says he hopes to rein in companies that promote LGBTQ rights and racial justice without also letting conservatives air their views in the workplace. He estimates his group filed some 275 proposals in the past decade. Over at the National Legal and Policy Center, another right-leaning group in the Washington area, Paul Chesser is doing much the same. Hired in 2021 to direct the group’s Corporate Integrity Project, Chesser is almost single-handedly responsible for the doubling of conservative proposals this year.

Chesser, 58, and Shepard, 49, both conservative writers and researchers, communicate enough to avoid bringing similar measures at the same company, Chesser says. Both groups raise funds mostly from individual donors, according to their spokespeople. During this year’s proxy season—the late winter through spring months when most companies issue annual reports, schedule annual meetings, and mail ballots to shareholders—the two groups say they sponsored 55 proposals, up from 27 in 2021.

Of the 25 from Chesser’s group, all but two appeared on corporate ballots—no small feat given that companies work hard to keep proposals from being voted on. Four of Chesser’s proposals notched support from 34% to 40% of proxy voters, remarkably high for first-time filings. “We’re of the opinion corporations shouldn’t be involved in politics,” he says, and should be managed simply to maximize profits, a position some view as political itself.

Chesser’s group opposes the transition away from fossil fuels because investing in costly alternatives could reduce earnings. It also criticizes corporate boards that include women and minorities yet lack individuals from “non-elite” economic or political backgrounds, saying they lack diversity of thought. Such a measure at JPMorgan Chase & Co. got only 4% support. His proposals calling for disclosure of company political or charitable giving at ConocoPhillips, McDonald’s, and Twitter won support from 19% to 40% of voters, well above the 5% the SEC requires for first-time proposals to be resubmitted.

Shepard’s group filed 30 proxy measures, of which 17 went to a vote, he says. Most got 3% support or less. Many of his measures asked companies, including AT&T, CVS Health, and Walt Disney, to conduct a racial equity audit to investigate discrimination against, essentially, White men. Emphasizing race in hiring creates “massive reputational, legal and financial risk” if others are discriminated against, a supporting statement notes.

SEC rules require a shareholder to own at least $2,000 of a target company’s stock for at least three years to file a proposal. Companies have found numerous ways to keep them off their ballots, including by petitioning the SEC to let them boot a proposal by claiming it’s “substantively similar” to another already on the ballot or arguing it’s irrelevant to the company’s purpose. In the past, the SEC leaned toward the view of many company managers who find proxy ballot battles a distraction or waste of time. No longer: The agency in November said companies would face greater skepticism when asking to keep significant social issues off their proxies. The SEC followed that in July by proposing to make it harder to claim measures are similar to those already filed.

Most ballot proposals fail to garner strong support from fellow investors, much less a majority. Those that do win more than 50% aren’t binding on a board, but can pressure it to adopt changes or risk becoming the target of activist investors, who often point to such votes while campaigning to unseat directors.

Other shareholder proponents view the groups’ work with skepticism. “No one’s taking them seriously,” says Andrew Behar, chief executive officer of the nonprofit As You Sow, which promotes socially responsible investing. But Heye, the Republican strategist, says it’s too soon to count the groups out. “This is new territory for conservatives.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-31/conservatives-embrace-anti-woke-proxy-votes-to-blunt-esg

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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