Folksy old Bill Nye, the non-science guy is getting himself into the limelight again

His academic background is in mechanical engineering so his claim to be a science guy is thin to start with -- and his ignoring of climate facts reduces him to the status of a prophet rather than a scientist.  And prophets love attention.  And that is pretty clearly what drives Bill.  He is a narcissist.  He feeds off attention.  Science is optional.

The heading of his most recent article in the pseudo-intellectual "Salon" is "Bill Nye demolishes climate deniers: “The single most important thing we can do now is talk about climate change.” But the article in fact demolishes nobody and nothing.  It is simply a parade of Nye's unsupported opnions.

His Fascism is however in clear view.  He says:  "Part of the solution to this problem or this set of problems associated with climate change is getting the deniers out of our discourse. You know, we can’t have these people – they’re absolutely toxic. And so part of the message in this book is to get the deniers out of the picture"

He does not say how he intends to accomplish that but another socialist of around 70 years ago used gas ovens so would the apple fall far from the tree if circumstances enabled it?  Be that as it may, scientific debate is clearly not on the agenda of "scientist" Nye. He is a prophet in a thin disguise of scientific clothes.

The article is such a lightweight load of tosh that I am not inclined to reproduce it but you can find it here if you have nothing better to do.




Wow!  Statistician Briggs really goes to town on the Warmists

I reproduce his excellent recent post below.  He does however miss an important point.  He is almost certainly aware of the point but wisely has decided to fight one battle at a time.  I however am the maverick who keeps mentioning that hugely important but hugely "incorrect" matter, something that influences almost everything in human behaviour but which the Left have declared  unmentionable:  IQ

The two areas in the diagram that show greatest belief in global warming -- Africa and Latin America -- are also regions with low average IQ -- according to Lynn's survey of the test statistics.  So I am a bit more sanguine than Briggs.  I think the data show that it is mainly dummies who believe in global warming.  There!  I've said it.  In their stereotyped and juvenile way the Left can now call me a racist.  Evidence does not matter to Leftists.  Only their hate of others matters



Before we start, you can and must combat propaganda by saying global warming. Do not say climate change. This admonition cannot be repeated enough. Please pass it on.

To say climate change is to concede a fallacy. A lie. To say climate change is to admit complete and utter defeat. We were promised global warming, not climate change. Make them stick to their promise.

Now if the globe warms, the climate has changed. But the climate also changes if the globe cools. The climate changes if it becomes wetter or again if it becomes drier. It changes if there are more storms or fewer. It changes if there are thicker or thinner clouds. It changes if the first day of frost is earlier or later. In short, the climate always changes. Absolutely always. No power on earth can stop it.

To say “climate change” is to concede the tacit argument that anything that happens does so because of mankind. This is preposterous and will lead to devilry on the part of our beneficent leaders. The new Pew study is proof of this.

Incidentally, if you’re quoting an author who has mistakenly said “climate change” when he meant “global warming”, use the literary device of swapping the error with brackets. Thus “Are you a climate change denier?” becomes “Are you a [global warming] denier?”

The answer is, incidentally, Reality Herself is a global warming denier.

Tom Richard from the Examiner emailed me yesterday for comments on the new Pew survey on [global warming] beliefs. I was out and by the time I had returned I missed his deadline, so I’m commenting now. Read Richard’s piece “Pew Research: Most Americans don’t think global warming a serious problem.” Note that Richard wisely says global warming.

The picture at the top is lifted from the survey and is proof global warming propaganda works. Just look! Some 77% of Latin Americans have been duped and agree that “[Global warming] is harming people now.” This is false. It is not true. It is absurd. Yet three-quarters of the folks down below believe it. And so do two out of every five norteamericanos.

Is it really 77% of all adult Latin Americans, given the immensity and diversity of that continent? I mean, can we rely on the precision of this number? No, probably not. And the same is true for the other areas surveyed. Pew reports a theoretical uncertainty bound, but it’s safe to at least double, perhaps even triple, this. So it might not be 77%, but anywhere from (I’m guessing) 60%-90%.

It doesn’t matter. The correct answer is 0%. Global warming is not harming people now. The temperature has bounced around these past two decades, but it hasn’t warmed in any real sense. Since global warming hasn’t happened, it can’t have harmed any person.

Real actual climate change can, it is true, cause harm. Earlier frosts mean smaller crops. But real actual climate change can, it is just as true, cause benefits. Later frosts mean larger crops. Notice that Pew never asked anybody if real actual climate change is helping people now.

The presumption is that any change in the weather (yes, weather) is caused, perhaps not wholly but surely predominately, by man. This is asinine and false—and dangerous. Politicians and activists who want to accumulate power and money want you to believe it, though. They lie, they insinuate, they hint, they cajole, they spew weasel words to get you to believe what is false.

And it works! Dammit, it works beautifully.

Their immoral actions are paying off. Half the globe has swallowed the lie. Want more proof? Look at the difference in answers between “[Global warming] is harming people now” and “Very concerned that [global warming] will harm me personally.” Fewer people think they personally will suffer if the temperature soars a fraction of a degree (Celsius) averaged globally. Stated another way, more people think they’ll be okay, but it’s the other guy who’s in danger.

But this can’t be so. It’s just one planet, right? The discrepancy is proof again that propaganda inculcates a vague indefinable fear and a strong desire that something need be done. You yourself might be okay, because after all a slight warming is harmless, but they other guy, well, he needs government intervention.

This harmful desire is proved later in the survey when scads and scads of otherwise sane adults agree that “Our country should limit greenhouse gas emissions as part of an international agreement.” This is translated as, “Since the climate always changes, please make this permanent and ineradicable crisis a priority with the government for all time.”

And that’s translated to, in its simplest form, “Please make slaves of us.”

Addendum We know we do not know how the atmosphere works to any important degree because climate models do not make skillful predictions, which they would if we did understand the atmosphere. Thus it is a lie, an outright whopper, to claim knowledge where we have proof of its absence.

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The obsession with global warming will put the lights out all over Britain

We are destroying our sources of secure energy as windless Wednesday showed this week

Charles Moore

I spent much of Wednesday in fields in southern England. It was very warm for the time of year. I noticed there was almost no wind. Usually, even on calm days, one can see the autumn leaves trembling slightly on the branch, but there the stillness was absolute.

"Is the Western policy elites’ obsession with global warming itself a threat to civilised life on the planet?"

The following morning, it was reported – though not as widely as it should have been – that, for the first time, the National Grid had been so worried by a possible shortage of power when people got home from work on Wednesday that it had appealed to industry to reduce power consumption. Energy markets went wild. At one point, the Financial Times said, the grid was paying Severn Power £2,500 per megawatt hour: the usual going rate is £60.

The day before the potential outage, I had appeared on the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2 to talk about Lady Thatcher’s clothes. I was preceded by the fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood. She spoke good sense about how our first woman prime minister’s couture should find a home in the V&A ; but she prefaced her remarks by stating that she detested Margaret Thatcher. By encouraging “capitalism”, Dame Vivienne alleged, the Iron Lady had caused climate change.

I had a comparably surreal encounter with the singer Charlotte Church on BBC Question Time a few weeks earlier. Charlotte insisted that the war in Syria was the result of climate change. Every ill is blamed on global warming. No doubt it also causes the obesity epidemic, female genital mutilation and TV licence evasion.

But now we have reached the point when, on a warm day in early November, the country can run short of electricity, it is time to turn the question round. Is the Western policy elites’ obsession with global warming itself a threat to civilised life on the planet?

Commenting on wobbly Wednesday, the distinguished energy expert Professor Dieter Helm said: “We are now sailing very close to the wind.” I am not sure whether he was playing with that metaphor, but he is right. Of electricity generated in Britain in 2014, 19 per cent came from renewables, the majority of that being wind. So if there ain’t no wind, there’s much less power. And without wind, there has to be a non-intermittent “despatchable” source of energy, such as gas or dirty energy from emergency diesel generators, to plug the gap. And if you have to buy emergency energy, you – or rather we, the consumers – have to pay emergency prices.

The problems of emergency are only the most visible tip of it. Because, for green, EU-driven reasons, the Government hastens the closure of coal-fired power stations (still 30 per cent of our electricity generation) and prevents the construction of new ones, it needs other sorts of power stations. But when it held its “capacity auction” last December, no new gas-fired power stations resulted. The potentially interested companies feared the political risk which now infects the subject and the knowledge that, if green policies continue, the demand for non-green power will sink lower.

So now we have coal-fired power stations closing down, no new gas-fired power stations coming on stream and – even after the friendly words exchanged between David Cameron and the President of China in London last month – no actual, definite money to ensure we get the promised nuclear power station at Hinkley Point. The energy “safety cushion” has lost its stuffing. All we know is that the current renewables subsidies of £4 billion will rise to £8.5 billion by 2020: we’ll be getting lots more offshore wind-farms (there being fewer angry voters in the sea than on land).

On Thursday, I attended the glittering ceremony at the Savoy Hotel in which Mr Cameron was made Parliamentarian of the Year by The Spectator. In his acceptance speech, he emphasised that “security” was one of the chief concerns of his second term. He was speaking about defence and terrorism, but what about the security of our energy supply? The former is menaced by actual enemies; the danger to the latter is entirely self-inflicted. If successive governments had not, in the name of saving the planet, set about destroying the reasonably well-functioning post-privatisation market, we would not now be in danger of plunging ourselves into darkness.

A few weeks ago, the Financial Times reported an authoritative calculation that, in 2016-17, Britain will need a capacity of 56 gigawatts, but will actually have only 53 gigawatts. Just as we are reducing our financial deficit, we are creating an energy one. Just as the supply of fossil fuels such as oil and shale gas vastly increases (thus reducing the cost), so ever-higher electricity costs caused by renewables subsidy are wiping out our steel industry.

Obviously we must not forget that there are only 30 days left to save the world. In early December, in Paris, “COP 21”, the latest UN climate conference, will take place. Religious authorities like the Pope, the Dalai Lama and Roger Harrabin of the BBC all insist that global agreement on emissions reduction must be reached there if catastrophe is to be averted. Indeed there can be little doubt that a document will be signed. But a couple of qualifications should be borne in mind.

The first is that it is quietly admitted that there will be no legally binding agreement. The developing countries will not submit themselves, by law, to the hairshirt which Western powers love wearing. They will promise to cut emissions, and we know that they won’t. We shall promise to pay them $100 billion a year to assist greener energy, and they know that we won’t. The objective, rather than the rhetorical effect, will therefore be to make the idea of legally binding targets die. If the EU, including Britain, tries to persist with them alone, we shall turn our continent into a retirement home and leave the rest of world history to others.

The second qualification is disclosed in another news story this week. The New York Times revealed that China has been burning 17 per cent more coal per year than it previously thought. Since the whole edifice of global climate change reduction depends on what the Bali conference of 2007 called “measurable, reportable, verifiable” figures for emissions, the fact that a quantity larger than the entire annual fossil fuel consumption of Germany could previously have been missed suggests that the figures are nearly meaningless.

Like most people – possibly everyone – who takes part in the global-warming debate, I do not know what will happen to the temperature of the Earth in a century’s time. What I do know, because it is plainly visible, is that the attempt to run the world as if we can control our eco-fate 100 years hence is statistically fantastical, politically impossible, economically ruinous and morally bogus. “The lights are going out all over Europe,” lamented Sir Edward Grey in 1914. That was because of a war. Now we are doing our best to put them out all over again, in the name of the common good.

SOURCE





Obama Leads But No One Follows In Climate Change Fight

The president wants to decarbonize the planet by killing fossil-fuel production and its high-paying jobs. Almost no other nation is following his lead despite the promises that will be made at the Paris climate summit.

Last week we learned in a Reuters report that Asia will build 500 coal-burning electric generation plants this year alone. An additional 1,000 are planned in China, India, Japan, Indonesia and other countries. The latest projections are that 40% of the added power generation in Southeast Asia by 2040 will be coal-fired.

Does this sound like a continent that’s taking the alarm bells of catastrophic global warming seriously? So America shuts down its coal plants, while the rest of the world builds them.

If that isn’t bad enough news for the climate change lobby, the Times of London reports the world can “nearly double the available supplies of oil and gas in the next 35 years.” And oil giant BP has issued a report that concludes: “This impending glut of hydrocarbons has demolished fears that the world is running out of oil.”

The world’s reserves of oil are going up and are now just shy of 3 trillion barrels. The well is not running dry, in other words, and countries are going to burn more fossil fuel in the years to come.

Meanwhile, negotiators in Paris are trying to keep their game faces on and pretend they’re making great progress in reducing emissions.

Are they living in the twilight zone?

Here in America, Obama has put a regulatory straitjacket on American producers of oil, gas and coal. But just the expected increase in coal production over the next decade in China and India could surpass the total the U.S. consumes each year.

Globally, carbon emissions are likely to rise way above treaty pledges because coal is becoming cheaper to produce. Then there’s fracking, which produces massive quantities of clean-burning and cheap natural gas that competes directly with coal.

Why won’t the climate lobby rally behind fracking and natural gas as a planet saver?

What’s clear is that Asia’s priority right now is growth — and rightfully so. Nations there hope to soon move nearly 1 billion more of their citizens into a Western middle-class living standard. That requires cheap energy, not expensive and unreliable green energy.

When the Paris meetings end, expect happy talk from the leaders of the world that nations have made iron-clad commitments to move away from fossil fuels.

Alas, the only person on the planet who’s still naive enough to believe the fantasy is Barack Obama.

And he calls us deniers!

SOURCE





Sen. Mike Lee: Preempt Bid by ‘Smug’ Obama to Bypass Congress on Global Climate Deal

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is calling on Congress to make it clear to the Obama administration and foreign governments “that in America it’s the Congress, and not the president acting alone, that writes the checks.”

Lee was talking about President Obama’s attempt to circumvent the Senate’s advise-and-consent role ahead of a major U.N. conference seeking a new global climate agreement.

Lawmakers in both chambers and both parties have the duty “to assert with one voice that Congress will not send a dime of taxpayer money to the implementation of any agreement to which the Senate has not provided its advice and consent,” Lee said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday.

Along with Congress wielding “its most powerful tool – the power of the purse,” he called for a joint resolution expressing the sense of Congress that the agreement envisaged by the administration for the conference in Paris should be submitted to the Senate for ratification.

Lee recalled that the Senate had passed such a bipartisan measure – in a 95-0 vote – in 1997 when the Clinton administration was negotiating the Kyoto Protocol. Even then-Sen. John Kerry – an ardent global warming advocate who as secretary of state is at the forefront of the administration’s current climate drive – voted for it

(The Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1998 but never ratified, and President George W. Bush withdrew in 2001.)

Lee said the level of support for the 1997 resolution proved that it was possible “to assemble a bipartisan coalition, not to debate the merits of the president’s climate change policies – though that is in fairness a debate that we also need to have – but to assert the right of the American people to consent to their laws.”

Even as recently as 2009, ahead of a U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, then-Sen. Kerry said – during Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing as secretary of state – that he and his Senate Foreign Relations Committee colleagues would be “deeply involved in crafting a solution that the world can agree to and that the Senate can ratify.”

Lee said that statement had not been especially remarkable at the time. But “today this consensus appears quite tragically no longer to exist.”

He quoted White House press secretary Josh Earnest as saying last March – when asked whether Congress has the right to approve a new climate agreement – “I think it’s hard to take seriously from some members of Congress who deny the fact that climate change exists that they should have some opportunity to render judgment about a climate change agreement.”

“That’s actually what he said – those are his words,” Lee said. “In other words he’s saying, ‘unless you share the White House view about climate change – both about the science behind it and about what we do about it – unless you share that view, you’re going to be disqualified from having anything to say about it, even if you’re a United States senator, and notwithstanding the fact the Constitution requires Senate ratification of an agreement like that.”

“In the span of just six years, what was once respect has been turned into contempt,” Lee said.

“[T]oday, with just one year remaining in office, in the White House – and with the smug satisfaction of someone who believes the policy of climate change is just as settled as the science supposedly is – President Obama knows that compulsion, not persuasion, is the only way to fundamentally transform a nation, as least transform it in the way he wants to transform it.”

‘Targets and timetables’

The conference in Paris is, in the U.N.’s jargon, the 21st “Conference of the Parties” to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a legally-binding treaty which the U.S. Senate ratified in 1992.

Unlike the later-negotiated Kyoto Protocol, the UNFCCC did not set targets for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

When the George H.W. Bush administration was seeking Senate ratification for the UNFCCC, it “represented that any protocol or amendment to the UNFCCC creating binding GHG emissions targets would be submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent,” according to a 2010 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s subsequent report during that ratification process stated that any “decision by the Conference of the Parties to adopt targets and timetables would have to be submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent before the United States could deposit its instruments of ratification for such an agreement.”

Critics of the administration’s climate policies argue therefore that any new international climate agreement containing “targets and timetables” should be treated as a treaty, and require Senate advice and consent.

But the New York Times reported in August last year that Obama was working on reaching an agreement in Paris in a way that would enable him to sidestep the hurdle of Senate ratification – a “hybrid” agreement that would combine new voluntary GHG emission-reduction goals with legally-binding procedural aspects of the UNFCCC.

A year ago, Obama announced ambitious plans for Paris – a reduction of GHG emissions in the U.S. by 26-28 percent by 2025, compared with 2005 levels.

The State Department said Thursday the administration’s special envoy for climate change, Todd Stern, will join climate ministers from around the world in Paris for a week of talks beginning Friday, for multilateral discussions ahead of the conference and bilateral meetings in support of “efforts to secure an ambitious, durable, and transparent global climate agreement.”

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If the Planet's Warming, Why Is McCarthy Going After AC?

The 27th Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol, which began on Sunday, came to a close Thursday in Dubai. The United States was represented by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who urged an amendment to the Montreal Protocol that would require a global reduction in hydrofluorocarbons. In an op-ed for The Guardian, she wrote, “Our planet’s fragile ozone layer is on a path toward full restoration by about 2050. But there’s a hitch: the success has hinged largely on replacing ozone-depleting substances with hydrofluorocarbon (HFCs) — chemicals we now know are highly damaging to the environment.” Consequently, McCarthy now advocates a universal policy curbing HFCs in equipment and material like air conditioners, refrigerators and insulation. She continues:

“It was the 1987 Montreal Protocol, one of the most successful environmental treaties in history, which led to HFCs replacing ozone-destroying pollutants. On 1 November, at the international meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol in Dubai, the United States will make a powerful case for better management of HFC pollution worldwide. Because of the importance of taking aggressive action on these chemicals to achieve global climate goals, I will be leading the United States delegation at that meeting. … Solutions are here, and it’s time to amend the Montreal Protocol to reflect that.”

Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw quips, “Maybe it’s just me, but the same moment you’re telling everyone how much warmer it’s getting might not be the best time to take away their air conditioner.” Besides, researchers just informed us that rising global temperatures are ruining Americans' sex lives. Moreover, they hypothesize that the population is bigger today because of air conditioning. And now they want to take that away? Liberal logic — it’s why we can’t have nice things.

SOURCE

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