EU "refugee" influx all due to global warming

This claim had to come of course. But since there has been no global warming for over 18 years it CANNOT be true.  Things that don't exist don't cause ANYTHING

The satellites are the only way of obtaining a truly global temperature reading and for the last 18 years they just show random fluctuations around a constant mean. Here's the graph:



And even the terrestrial datasets show no statistically significant global temperature change over the last 18 years.

Global temperatures are anything but uniform, however, and there may have been some local warming in some places which was offset by cooling in other places.  But local warming is not global warming, to be reluctantly tautologous


Climate change can affect agricultural productivity and the incentives of people to remain in rural areas. This column looks at the effects of warming trends on rural-urban and international migration. In middle-income economies, higher temperatures increased emigration rates to urban areas and to other countries. In very poor countries, however, higher temperatures reduced the probability of emigration to cities or to other countries, consistent with the presence of liquidity constraints.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), which is the most comprehensive and relevant analysis of climate change, concludes that hundreds of millions of people will be affected by climate change. Its consequences will be felt directly and indirectly via resource availability and population movements, spreading consequences across the globe.

For this reason, the EU’s foreign and security policies, as well as official publications and strategies, have devoted increasing attention to climate-related factors. For instance, the joint report by Javier Solana and the European Commission defines climate change as a ‘threat’ multiplier, as it could be responsible for political and security risks affecting European interests (European Council 2008). Environmentally induced migration is quoted among the various threats identified in the report. According to the Council Conclusions on EU Climate Diplomacy, adopted in June 2011, climate change is a global environmental and development challenge with significant implications related to security and migratory pressures (European Council 2011).

The idea that climate-related migration could generate repercussions for European security is related to the possibility of large inflows of people from the areas adversely affected by climate change. Predictions of these flows, however, are extremely imprecise and based on a very wide range of hypotheses. The number of predicted migrants range wildly from 25 million to one billion over the next 40 years (IOM 2009). Vulnerability to climate change in poor countries, while certainly increasing the incentive to migrate, does not necessarily imply that migration will occur. Climate change, by decreasing the available resources, may constrain the ability to emigrate, and some vulnerable individuals may find themselves less mobile and less likely to migrate (Barrett 2008, Cattaneo and Massetti 2015, Gray and Mueller 2012, Foresight 2011).

New research

In a recent paper (Cattaneo and Peri 2015), we tackle the connection between increasing temperatures and migration by analysing the effect of differential warming trends across countries on the probability of migrating out of the country or migrating from rural to urban areas. A crucial insight is that by impoverishing rural populations and worsening their income perspectives, long-term warming affects migration in different ways, depending on the initial income of those rural populations. A decline in agricultural productivity, causing a decline in rural income, seems to have a depressing effect on the possibility of emigrating in extremely poor countries where individuals live on subsistence income. Lower income worsens their liquidity constraint, implying that potential migrants have a reduced ability to pay for migration costs and to afford travel and relocation costs. In this case, global warming may trap rural populations in local poverty. In contrast, in countries where individuals are not extremely poor, a decline in agricultural income strengthens the incentives to migrate to cities or abroad. Decreasing agricultural productivity may encourage a mechanism that ultimately leads to economic success of migrants, benefitting their country of origin and shifting people out of agriculture into urban environments.

Using decade changes between 1960 and 2000 for 116 countries, ranging from very poor to middle income, we perform a regression analysis that controls for country effects, decade effects, and several other geographic variables and allows for a different impact of temperature on emigration and urbanisation rates in poor and middle-income countries.

We find that increasing temperatures are associated with lower emigration and urbanisation rates in very poor countries.
In contrast, in middle-income countries they are associated with positive changes in emigration and urbanisation rates.

The incentive effect driven by lower agricultural productivity prevails in middle-income countries, and rural population is driven to cities, speeding the country's structural transformation and ultimately increasing income per person. In poor countries, the worsening of the liquidity constraint due to lower agricultural productivity prevails, and urbanisation and emigration are slowed.

Urbanisation and industrialisation are crucial mechanisms for GDP growth. For countries with intermediate levels of income per person, warming can push towards these gains. However, for countries where agricultural productivity is so low as to trap rural populations at subsistence levels, warming may instead slow economic transformation. These effects could contribute to divergence of income between poor and middle-income countries.

Where do people migrate to in response to warming?

Does warming produce large scale movements of individuals from middle-income countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to rich countries in Europe and North America? Or does it produce more local migrations in the regions?

We find that growing temperatures are mainly associated with emigration to non-OECD destinations that are close to the countries of origin (especially those within a 1,000km radius).
Emigration to OECD (i.e. rich) countries does not seem affected.
This result is consistent with the idea that climate-driven emigration is associated with a worsening of local opportunities and migrants move where they have better chances of finding a job given their current constraints. This ‘push’ factor (decreased rural income) increases migration to similar economies rather than to OECD economies. On the other hand, the migration-reducing effect for poor countries (due to worsening opportunities) affects both types of destination, as potential emigrants become less likely to leave the country altogether. Combining the effect on poor and middle-income countries, it appears that increases in average temperatures may actually decrease overall emigration to OECD countries. Middle-income countries are not more likely to experience emigration towards those destinations, while poor countries experience a reduction in emigration rates altogether. These findings suggest that climate change is unlikely to be the driver of large migrations to Europe as the impact on poor countries seems negative and climate-related migrations seem more local.

Migration and natural disasters

Climate change is also expected to bring an intensification of extreme weather events. For this reason, we tested whether temperature anomalies and natural disasters such as droughts, floods, and storms influence emigration rates in middle-income and poor countries. We find that long-run emigration rates in poor or middle income countries are not significantly affected by the occurrence of these events. It is likely that natural disasters drive different types of migration, more akin to local mobility and temporary. Given their relatively rare occurrence and temporary nature in the considered period, extreme weather episodes did not affect significantly long-run rural-urban and international migration.

Conclusions

In this column we have focused on the potential impact of growing average temperatures on rural-urban and international migration. We found that in very poor countries, warming implies less emigration. Rural populations may be stuck in deeper poverty with fewer resources to migrate. In contrast, in countries where income is not as low, lower agricultural productivity increases the incentives to migrate, producing higher emigration rates. Through these different responses temperature changes may contribute to a divergence of income and opportunities between very poor and middle-income countries. Finally, a future of increased migrations to Europe or to the US driven by global warming is not a scenario supported by our analysis.

SOURCE





Global warming bad for turtles

It's a good thing we are not having any, then.  They show below that different temperatures affect turtle reproduction but they have NO data on global warming

Marine turtles deposit their eggs in underground nests where they develop unattended and without parental care. Incubation temperature varies with environmental conditions, including rainfall, sun, shade and sand type, and affects developmental rates, hatch and emergence success, and embryonic sex. Although the loggerhead turtle has been around for more than 60 million years, drought, heavy rainfalls and climatic changes are impacting hatchling sex ratios and influencing future reproduction. Because sea turtles don’t have an X or Y chromosome, their sex is defined during development by the incubation environment. Warmer conditions produce females and cooler conditions produce males.

Researchers from Florida Atlantic University have just published the results of a four-year study in the journal Endangered Species Research, on the effects of turtle nest temperatures and sand temperatures and on hatchling sex. “The shift in our climate is shifting turtles as well, because as the temperature of their nests change so do their reproduction patterns,” said Jeanette Wyneken, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences in FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. “The nesting beaches along Florida’s coast are important, because they produce the majority of the loggerhead hatchlings entering the northwestern Atlantic Ocean.”

Loggerhead turtles are already fighting an uphill battle since roughly one in 2,500 to 7,000 sea turtles make it to adulthood. The typical loggerhead produces about 105 eggs per nesting season and would have to nest for more than 10 nesting seasons over the span of 20 to 30 years just to replace herself and possibly one mate. And, if enough males aren’t produced because of climate changes, then this will result in a dire problem for this species. “If climatic changes continue to force the sex ratio bias of loggerheads to even greater extremes, we are going to lose the diversity of sea turtles as well as their overall ability to reproduce effectively. Sex ratios are already strongly female biased,” said Wyneken. “That’s why it’s critical to understand how environmental factors, specifically temperature and rainfall, influence hatchling sex ratios.”

Wyneken and her team documented rainfall and sand temperature relationships as well as rainfall, nest temperatures and hatchling sex ratios at a loggerhead turtle nesting beach in Boca Raton, located in southeast Florida. Nesting season, which runs from April through October, were sampled across 2010 and 2013. The researchers used temperature dataloggers in the sand at three locations and buried them at three different depths to create temperature profiles of the sand column above the level that would directly influence eggs. The rainfall data were graphed in temporal synchrony with sand temperature for each depth. Nest temperatures were recorded throughout incubation. Rainfall data collected concurrently with sand temperatures at different depths showed that light rainfall affected only the surface sand; effects of the heaviest rainfall events tended to lower sand temperatures, however, the temperature fluctuations were very small once the moisture reached upper nest depths.

Nest temperature profiles were synchronized with rainfall data from weather services to identify relationships with hatchling sex ratios. The sex of each turtle was verified laparoscopically to provide empirical measures of sex ratios for the nest and the nesting beach. “The majority of hatchlings in the sampling were female, suggesting that across the four seasons most nest temperatures were not sufficiently cool to produce males,” said Wyneken. “However, in the early portion of the nesting and in wet years, nest temperatures were cooler, and significantly more males hatched.”

SOURCE




Germans pay heaps for electricity they DON'T use!

Online daily Die Welt here reports on how German consumers are being forced to pay huge sums of money to wind park and solar plant operators who are ordered to stop feeding electricity into the grid, but yet get paid anyway!

As volatile green electricity increasingly gets fed into an ever more unstable German power grid, wind parks and solar energy producers are being asked ever more frequently to switch off their plants to prevent grid overloads. Yet, they still receive money for the power they would have produced. It’s one of the nutty peculiarities of Germany’s wacky green energy feed-in act.

Die Welt calls this never-produced power “phantom electricity”. But it is costing consumers real cash.

One reason wind parks are unable to feed into the power grid at times is because the transmission lines needed to carry away the excess power are too inadequate to handle the frequent overloads, or they just don’t exist. Die Welt reports:

Because power lines are missing, wind parks have to be switched off more and more often. Yet wind entrepreneurs get paid for not producing. The costs for this are rising rapidly.”

Making money (and doing so with absolutely no risk) has never been easier!

Naturally this is causing electricity bills for German consumers to jump yet again. Die Welt reports that just the green electricity feed-in surcharge levied on consumers will reach “a record value of 6.35 cents per kilowatt-hour” next year. Now consumers will also have to pay even more money for power that never gets produced.

Already this year it is expected that a quarter billion euros will be added to electricity bills for the green kilowatt-hours which were never produced.”

This, Die Welt writes, is based on calculations by the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur). The reason the estimated 1580 gigawatt-hours of electricity were never produced (but still paid for): “…because there was not enough powerline capacity to deliver the power to consumers.”

Consequently: green power producers and investors get off scot-free; consumers get the shaft.

The quarter-billion-euro amount is three times higher than the 82.6 million euros from a year earlier.
Die Welt reports that this warped market situation will only worsen in the future. As more volatile wind and solar energy come online, Germany tries to unload the excess power from it’s overloaded grid by dumping it into neighboring foreign markets such as in Poland or the Czech Republic, sometimes even at negative prices.

However these eastern neighbors are refusing to allow all the excess electricity to flood into their national grids unhindered. Die Welt reports: “Beginning next year Poland and the Czech Republic want to prevent German green power from coming into neighboring countries by employing power blockers at their borders, so-called phase shifters.”

So, on windy and sunny days, excess German green power will have no place to go, and thus this will necessitate the shutting down of even more wind parks and solar plants. That means the tab for the never-produced (phantom) electricity will continue it’s upward spiral. The result: even more money flooding up from the poor to the coffers of the rich.

No wonder the German model has become an export hit to countries with greedy green energy developers and investors! Making money has never been easier.

SOURCE





Antarctic Ice is Growing, Even Hit a 'Record,' But Evening News Shows Hype Melting Arctic Instead

Like the nag of a dripping faucet, the liberal news media spent years warning about melting glaciers and ice caps because of global warming.

Media outlets predicted an “ice-free” Arctic time and again, and so far have been wrong. But with all the panic about melting glaciers, or sea ice, or ice at the poles the media have reported, one would imagine good news about increasing ice would at least get some attention.

Not from the broadcast networks anyway. In the past year, they’ve ignored data showing increasing ice in Antarctica, presumably because it did not fit perfectly with their climate agenda, instead choosing to hype melting Arctic ice repeatedly.

Between October 2014 and November 2015, NASA released two separate studies, both showing that ice in Antarctica is growing faster than it is melting. In May 2015, Antarctic ice was at a record high level. Yet between Nov. 4, 2014 and Nov. 11, 2015, the broadcast network’s evening news shows never mentioned either study.

During that same time however, the broadcast network’s evening news shows specifically mentioned melting ice in the Arctic 12 different times. All of those were on CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. But additional stories on all three evening shows implied that melting was occurring in polar regions because of global warming or climate change.

Jim Axelrod, the CBS national correspondent, included a frightening report in the July 21, 2015, Evening News, saying, “ever warming oceans melting polar ice could raise sea levels fifteen feet in the next fifty to a hundred years, NASA’s former climate chief now says. Five times higher than previous predictions.”

Axelrod then showed dire graphics of Miami, Seattle and New York City, all being flooded as a result of melting ice.

“The melting ice would cool ocean surfaces at the poles even more, while the overall climate continues to warm. The temperature difference would fuel even more volatile weather,” he warned.

In August, all three networks also turned to President Barack Obama to help draw attention to polar melting. On Aug. 3, ABC and NBC both aired Obama’s “personal plea” to cut emissions.

Obama said, “I don’t want my grandkids not to be able to swim in Hawaii or not to be able to climb a mountain and see a glacier because we didn’t do something about it.”

Not to be outdone, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley hyped the climate change focus of Obama’s trip to Alaska on Aug. 31, saying, “Tonight as the president visits Alaska, we’ll take you to the Portage Glacier to show you the dramatic effects of climate change.”

The next night Pelley continued the same refrain saying, “The president hiked today to Alaska’s Exit Glacier, which is melting. A sign marks where it stood in 1951. It shrunk a quarter of a mile. Proof, according to the president, that time is running out to reverse climate change.”

Pelley’s bias on the subject has been evident for years. He famously defended his decision not to include climate skeptics saying in 2006, “If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier.”

NBC has devoted significant resources to show climate change. On Sept. 15, 2015, Nightly News host Lester Holt said, “NBC News has spent the past four months traveling to the Arctic” to cover melting ice.

Holt cited a NASA study released that day that claimed that the Arctic “has recently seen the most sea ice melting since NASA began keeping track in 1978.”

Pelley highlighted the same story the next night saying, “Scientists say that the ice cap shrank to the fourth smallest area on record. The ice was measured by satellite in 1979, and since then it has decreased 38 percent.”

Although Nightly News and Evening News eagerly and quickly reported those NASA claims, less than one month later they refused to cover another NASA study showing ice grown happening in Antarctica.

That Oct. 30, 2015 report from NASA showed that snowfall accumulation in Antarctica had been “adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.”

“The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice,” NASA said.

CNN published the story online on Nov. 3, reporting, “Antarctica is gaining more ice than it has lost.”

In May 2015, Antarctic sea ice was at record levels, but the networks also ignored that. The very liberal Guardian (UK) newspaper reported that ice was growing so much that it was “making it harder to resupply and refuel research stations” that were hosting sea ice forecasting workshops. Yet the networks refused to cover it.

Even earlier, NASA reported in October 2014 that Antarctic sea ice growth was at a “record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s.”

“On Sept. 19, 2014, the five-day average of Antarctic sea ice extent exceeded 20 million square kilometers for the first time since 1979,” NASA said.

All that Antarctic ice growth stalled a research expedition to Antarctica full of scientists looking for proof of global warming In December 2013. The expedition became stranded when the sea ice froze so thick around their ship that a chinese rescue vessel couldn’t break through to reach them.

Methodology: MRC Business searched ABC, NBC, and CBS evening news show transcripts between Nov. 4, 2014 and Nov. 11, 2015 for the terms ice, glacier, polar, Arctic, Antarctic, and/or Antarctica. Within those stories, MRC Business evaluated all reports which focused on the long term growth or melting of ice in the polar regions. Reports discussing “Arctic blasts” or freezing lakes and rivers due to winter weather were not included.

SOURCE





Investors Urge Exxon to Take Moral Responsibility for Global Warming. So it's not coal that is the villain?

A few nuts have bought shares in Exxon, which enable them to create scenes at Exxon's AGM.  And what exactly is "moral" responsibility?  Does it mean "I didn't do it but I'll say I did"?

ExxonMobil stockholders are turning up the heat on management over the oil giant's history of resisting action to confront climate change with a first-ever request asking the company to accept moral responsibility for global warming.

The proposal by the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment calls on Exxon to take urgent climate action on moral grounds by agreeing to limit temperature rise to the globally accepted 2 degrees Celsius target. Tri-State represents nearly 40 Roman Catholic shareholder organizations with pension funds invested in the oil giant.

"ExxonMobil claims that its energy production responds to a 'moral imperative' to meet growing energy demand and eradicate poverty, but this does not offset the necessity to mitigate climate change or the moral imperative to limit warming to 2°C," according to the resolution.

A second proposal by the Province of St. Joseph of the Capuchin Order of friars asks stockholders to vote on naming someone with climate change expertise to the board for the second year in a row.

How Exxon responds to resolutions proposed for the company's annual meeting next May could add to scrutiny of the company, as New York State prosecutors probe what Exxon knew about global warming and what it told investors and the public. Meanwhile, lawmakers, presidential candidates, climate scientists and environmentalists increasingly are calling for federal investigations of Exxon under racketeering and securities fraud statutes.

"There is no doubt there is more interest in Exxon's conduct than ever before," said the Rev. Michael Crosby, who represents the friars and has called on the company to address climate change for more than a decade. "Exxon has dismissed calls to take responsible action on the climate for so long, and now maybe there will be a feeling that what we’ve been calling for was right all along."

The suggested resolutions, which still must be cleared by the Securities and Exchange Commission, are part of a 25-year campaign by corporate responsibility advocates to get Exxon and other fossil fuel producers to limit emissions of harmful greenhouse gases. Exxon has rejected all the resolutions, including a widely endorsed climate policy in corporate America—to set company-wide goals to lower its emissions.

The moral-responsibility proposal is "a different strategy," said Mary Beth Gallagher, acting director of New Jersey-based Tri-State. "Our hope is that it sends a signal that a company's shareholders care about how it generates profit, not just that it generates profits."

Exxon spokesman Scott J. Silvestri declined to address questions about the Tri-State resolution, saying the company will respond next year before the shareholder meeting. The company last week denied "allegations that ExxonMobil suppressed climate change research" after the office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a subpoena for documents spanning almost four decades. The subpoena follows an InsideClimate News investigative series showing that Exxon knew decades ago of the climate effects of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

Because shareholder requests at publicly traded companies are purely advisory, Exxon has no legal reason to heed shareholder demands on climate change. But there is a growing argument—most notably by Pope Francis in his encyclical on the climate and his speech to the U.S. Congress—that dealing with climate change is a moral obligation, said Tim Smith, senior vice president of Boston-based Walden Asset Management, which promotes environmental, social and corporate responsibility on behalf of investors.

"From a moral point of view, they could have been part of the early warning system," he said. "They chose another path. Now they have the opportunity to evolve and become more in line with the consensus on climate change."

But Exxon may have legal reasons not to accept the Tri-State resolution, according to Michael Gerrard, a professor of environmental law at Columbia University.

"It seems the resolution asks Exxon to admit certain things that Exxon may not want to admit," Gerrard said. "I could imagine any admission of this sort playing into some of the new theories of liability being considered."

Those include prosecuting Exxon under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, Gerrard said. The federal statute was originally enacted to fight organized crime but was successfully employed against the tobacco industry in the 1990s.

Shareholder Resolutions

The Tri-State proposal is among the first 2016 Exxon shareholder resolutions to be filed addressing climate change. Investors have until Dec. 16 to submit resolutions for annual meetings next year.

Exxon can challenge the Tri-State resolution before the SEC to keep it off the shareholder meeting agenda. If the SEC clears the proposal, the company can urge shareholders to vote against it. Managements often argue that such resolutions would tie executives' hands and interfere with profit-making. A Tri-State resolution asking Exxon to adopt clear goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from its products and operations received the support of just 9.6 percent of the company's stock in 2015.

Unlike previous resolutions, the moral-responsibility proposal doesn't ask Exxon to consider the potential financial risk to share values posed by tough climate policies.

"We believe that ExxonMobil should assert moral leadership with respect to climate change," a supporting statement to the resolution states. "This policy would supplement ExxonMobil’s existing positions on climate policy."

The introduction of the resolution cites Pope Francis' encyclical letter earlier this year that "the climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all."

By tapping into heightened awareness of climate change triggered by the pope's message and the recent revelations that Exxon's own scientists were worried about it as early as 1977, Tri-State's Gallagher said she hopes the company will be forced to re-examine its position.

Using data cited in Exxon's 2014 report prepared in response to shareholders questions, Energy and Carbon – Managing the Risks, Tri-State calculated that the increase in global temperature by 2040 will be 2.4 degrees, a significantly higher and more threatening level than 2 degrees.

In the report, Exxon told shareholders it believed greenhouse gas emissions would plateau and begin slowly declining over the next 25 years. It assured shareholders that it takes climate issues seriously, even though it would not adopt a climate policy, and said the company would continue to develop its hydrocarbon reserves.

SOURCE




VHEMT movement says humans need to die out to save planet

I am all for this mob.  May they practice what they preach and persuade lots of their fellow Greenies to do likewise

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement believes there is only one way to save the planet — and that is to stop reproducing and allow our species to die out.

While most of us think advocating the demise of humankind is a little dark, VHEMT says “returning Earth to its natural splendour and ending needless suffering of humanity are happy thoughts — no sense moping around in gloom and doom”.

VHEMT says it wasn’t created by just one person — it has been an awareness that has been around throughout history. However one man called Les Knight coined the movement’s name. They say Les, spurred by love and logic, came to the conclusion that Gaia — the idea that Earth is actually one large self-regulating organism — would be better off without humans.

So the obvious next question is do they really think this will catch on?

Surprisingly they say they are realistic about the prospects of no humans being left on the planet. They understand they will probably never see that day (I thought that was the point).

But believe if just one person chooses a life of no children then they think this is success.

“Even if our chances of succeeding were only one in a hundred, we would have to try,” VHEMT says on its website. “Giving up and allowing humanity to take its course is unconscionable. There is far too much at stake. The movement may be considered a success each time one more of us volunteers to breed no more. We are being the change we want to see in the world.”

So why wait if they are keen to see the end of humanity? Why not introduce a virus or orchestrate all out war to ensure the destruction of humans?

SOURCE

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