China halts production of 500 car models

The climate bigots are interpreting this as an obeisance to their pathetic little cult.  It is no such thing. China has REAL pollution problems -- with particulate pollution from coal-burning furnaces etc.  THAT is what the leadership is desperate to get down

China is suspending the production of more than 500 car models that do not meet its fuel economy standards, several automakers confirmed Tuesday, the latest move by Beijing to reduce emissions in the world's largest auto market and take the lead in battling climate change.

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua said in a report Sunday that the suspension, effective Monday, would affect both domestic carmakers and foreign joint ventures like FAW-Volkswagen and Beijing Benz. No end date was given.

The move was expected to affect a small share of car manufacturing in China, where 28 million vehicles were produced in 2016. China has dozens of small-scale automakers some producing just a few hundred cars a year and the central government has tried to consolidate its auto industry, a factor that most likely also played a role in the suspension.

Still, the measure pointed to a mounting willingness by China to test forceful antipollution policies and assume a leading role in the fight against climate change, experts said. The country, which for years prioritised economic growth over environmental protection and now produces more than a quarter of the world's human-caused greenhouse gases, has emerged as an unlikely bastion of climate action after President Donald Trump's rejection of the Paris climate agreement.

Chinese leaders are under intense pressure to rein in dangerous air pollution, a hot-button issue in China, where thick smog has at times forced schools and businesses to temporarily shut down. Late last month, China said it was going ahead with plans to create the world's largest carbon market, giving Chinese power companies a financial incentive to operate more cleanly.

"They're sending a signal to everybody that this is for real," said Michael Dunne, president of Dunne Automotive, a Hong Kong-based consultancy on China's clean car market. "This shows their emissions standards have teeth."

The Chinese government has already become the world's biggest supporter of electric cars, offering automakers numerous incentives for producing so-called new energy vehicles. Those incentives are set to decrease by 2020, to be replaced by quotas for the number of clean cars automakers must sell. That has spurred global automakers to pick up the pace in their shift toward battery-powered cars.

The fact that Chinese automakers like the state-run giant Dongfeng Motor Corp. did not appear to be spared "shows that the government is not playing favourites in trying to meet their goals," said Bruce M. Belzowski, managing director of the Automotive Futures group at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

The Chinese government had long held back from aggressive emissions standards to allow its own automakers to catch up with the latest clean car technology. But that is changing, with the government setting increasingly stringent tailpipe rules.

The latest development "is a testimony to how quickly their own automakers have evolved," Dunne said. "They're saying: We're ready to play this game."

Foreign automakers were still tallying the effect of the suspension on Tuesday. Volkswagen, General Motors, Honda and other foreign automakers in China referred queries on specific numbers to their Asia offices. Rebecca Kiehne of BMW, which runs the BMW Brilliance joint venture in China, said the company was not yet prepared to comment.

Han Tjan, a spokesman for Daimler, said production would not be affected at its Beijing Benz joint venture with the Chinese car manufacturer BAIC Motor Corp. The only car covered by the suspension was a high-end E-Class model the venture has not manufactured since 2016, he said.

Whatever the consequences, global automakers will have no choice but to meet the increasingly stringent government policies in China, said Michelle Krebs, an analyst at the AutoTrader Group.

"The simple fact that China is the biggest market means automakers will be accommodating," she said.

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Alarmists Trumpet ‘Global Warming’ amid Record Cold Temperatures

If the climate worked the way global warming theory says it does, we should have been getting ever milder winters.  Nothing like that has happened. Atmospheric CO2 has been steadily increasing and is now well above what was one said to be a critical level -- but the climate has not followed suit

Climate change alarmists continue to preach the dogma of global warming in a textbook case of cognitive dissonance, despite record low temperatures in different points around the globe.
This past week, Buffalo and Watertown, New York, registered their coldest week in recorded weather history. Boston, too, is set to tie its record of seven straight days with temperatures remaining below 20 degrees, reports Weather.com, which has not been seen in Beantown for exactly 100 years—since the week ending January 4, 1918. Flint, Michigan, set its all-time record-low temperature for December of 18 degrees below zero last Thursday morning.

North American cities too numerous to mention have been setting records for daily low temperatures, as the gelid weather wave shows its impressive staying power. For instance, the National Weather Service reported a temperature of minus 15 F in Omaha on Sunday, breaking a record low dating back to 1884.

So what is going on?

During the summer period, mainstream media offer an ongoing stream of reports of how climate change is causing higher temperatures and severe weather, yet when temperatures drop to record lows in wintertime, they write them off as normal cyclical weather phenomena.

“Deadly heat waves are going to be a much bigger problem in the coming decades,” warned CNN in a report last June, “becoming more frequent and occurring over a much greater portion of the planet.”

“Extreme heat waves,” CNN continued, “are frequently cited as one of the most direct effects of man-made climate change.”

As Australian science writer Joanne Nova quipped, for the radical climate crowd, “extreme cold is just weather but all heat waves are climate change.” While heat waves and extreme weather events are routinely pointed to as indicators of global warming trends, the coldest weather in over a century is simply brushed off as “natural variability.”

Or as J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia, sarcastically described the record-low temperatures, “What we are seeing right now in the United States is just, … well… wait for it… ‘winter.’”

Shepherd’s inconsistent use of cold and warm imply that cold is not just a lack of heat; it’s something fundamentally different, Nova wrote. “Heat, after all, can prove human attribution, but cold cannot prove the opposite.”

USA Today ran a defensive piece titled “It’s cold outside, but that doesn’t mean climate change isn’t real.” The article cited authorities pointing to other points of the globe that are experiencing warmer than average temperatures, in a bid to relativize the cold spell.

The ironic thing is, of course, that when the media speak of unusually hot weather as a sign of global warming, they never seem to look for places where it is unusually cold to show nature’s balance.

Meanwhile, USA Today also cited Shepherd, who stated that daily or weekly weather patterns “say nothing about longer term climate change,” something one never hears during the summer months when news outlets are falling over themselves to point to “yet another” indication that burning fossil fuels is making the earth a hotter place.

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan, claimed that the recent record-cold weather is not only happening despite global warming, but, indeed, “at least in part” because of it.

Overpeck’s theory is that a loss of Arctic ice has allowed more heat to transfer from the ocean to the atmosphere, causing a weakening of the polar vortex winds over the Arctic. As a result, more freezing Arctic air is swooping further south, he proposes.

“That is due to the warming of the Arctic, which in turn is due to human emissions of greenhouse gases and primarily burning of fossil fuels,” Overpeck declared.

In other words, all weather behavior—whether colder or warmer—becomes a confirmation that manmade global warming is real.

Or, as Dinesh D’Souza tweeted, “Since heat & cold are both taken as confirmation of global warming, what, if anything, can disprove this supposedly scientific hypothesis?”

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Global Warming Predictions, Especially About the Future, is Really Hard

In an article entitled, Al Gore’s Prediction For December 2017 Was Way, WAY Off The Mark, Andrew West outlines some of the scare mongering spouted by The High Priest of the Chruch of the Warming Globe, Al Gore.  Scare mongering did I say?  Yes, but I think that's putting it mildly what Gore has done.  I would add lying, profiteering, scamming and fraud to that list.  West goes on to say:

"Just how bad were some of Gore’s predictions?  Well, for starters, he believed that the North Pole would be completely devoid of ice by today." “NINE YEARS AGO THIS MONTH— Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years.”

“Gore made the prediction to a German audience in 2008. He told them that ‘the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years.’

“In January 2006, Al Gore posited ‘within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return’ and ‘a true planetary emergency’ due to global warming.”

And in the process he's managed to enrich himself immensly.  Apparently he didn't think the emergency was so great he should stop trying to get more money, or not live in massive energy sucking "$9 million beach front home in Montecito, [California]. Guess Al is not really afraid of sinking into the sea."

And we're shocked his prediction have been wrong?

Here's Anant Goel's discription of this massively expensive, disgustingly fraudlent scam by the world's biggest con artist of all time:

"Al Gore has a meltdown and despairs as his climate change alarmism fails with the general public. His worst fears are now being realized as he fails to become the planet's first climate Billionaire. This is my dream - that maybe one day we will get to see Al Gore grilled like this on the hundreds of millions of dollars he has made out of Global Warming

Dr. Don Easterbrook is a climate scientist who stated - seven years before Al Gore and the UNIPCC  shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize on their Global Warming predictions - stating the world would be cooling, not warming, and he was right.  As for these predictions he stated:

“When we check their projections against what actually happened in that time interval, they’re not even close. They’re off by a full degree in one decade, which is huge. That’s more than the entire amount of warming we’ve had in the past century. So their models have failed just miserably, nowhere near close. And maybe it’s luck, who knows, but mine have been right on the button,”

Then there's loony Prince Charlie.  It's no wonder the Queen of England keeps holding on to the throne.  In July of 2009 he predicted we only have 96 months to save world from burning up.  Well, there's only six months left to his prediction.  I wonder what the odds on a bet would be in Las Vegas that his prediction is going to fail?

In an effort to justify his loony ideas this guy - whose lived a life of luxury and privilege while never making any of the changes in his life he's been demanding of others - claims "the price of capitalism and consumerism is just too high"........ Blaming capitalism should be the first warning sign to anyone who pays attention to these loony leftist greenies there's something wrong with what they're saying.

But these two loons - albeit the most famous of the Sky is Falling crowd - are not alone.   The number of loons and loony predictions of a global warming catostrophe are Legion.

A massive list of failed predictors and their predictions appeared on Anthony Watts' website Watts ip With That, in the article, Some Failed Climate Predictions, which are far too numerous to list here, so please take the time to peruse this amazing list.

We have to get this once and for all.  Anyone promoting Anthropogenic Climate Change is either deliberately being fradulent, a semi-pagan secular green fanatic, or is as dumb as tree moss.

I think that sums it up nicely.  Have a good day!

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Climate Expert James Hansen: New York Will Have Vanished Underwater by Midnight!

Say goodbye to Lower Manhattan, everybody! By midnight tonight, it will be gone forever—drowned by the melting icecaps of the disappearing Arctic.

Obviously this will be quite sad for people who live in New York. But it will be a tremendous vindication for the expertise of James Hansen, the former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) who saw this disaster coming as far back as 2008.



In the highly unlikely event that James Hansen is proved wrong and New Yorkers wake up tomorrow morning to find their city unsubmerged it could prove somewhat embarrassing. Not so much for Hansen, perhaps, who appears to have no sense of embarrassment or shame. But definitely—or so you’d hope—for all the politicians, environmental activists, teachers and so on who have spent the last few decades giving so much credence to his experty expertise.

It was Hansen, remember, who basically launched the whole global warming scare. Hansen was the guy who in 1988 declared at a packed congressional hearing, as sweat visibly poured from his brow, that “the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements.”

Though this claim was disowned by his former supervisor Dr. John Theon who felt that Hansen had “embarrassed NASA”, it was swallowed lock stock and barrel by most of the world’s media, and a good many of its politicians, with consequences we are ruing to this day.

The great physicist and mathematician Dr. Freeman Dyson once said, “The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers. … Hansen has turned his science into ideology.”

So let’s hope, for the sake of Hansen’s credibility—and for the sake of all those who pinned their faith and their policymaking decisions on his expertise—that New York is underwater tomorrow.

Otherwise, Hansen and his people will have an awful lot of explaining and apologizing to do. Or so you’d hope…

SOURCE





Australia:  Former PM resisting carbon trading

Malcolm Turnbull is facing a backlash over his energy policy as conservative MPs including Tony Abbott condemn a proposal to allow power companies to meet emissions targets by buying permits from overseas as a “carbon tax” by stealth.

Mr Abbott has slammed the government’s in-­principle support for including international carbon credits in Australia’s energy policy, arguing that the move will see Australian businesses and consumers shovelling money to foreign carbon traders, with huge potential for rorts.

Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg ­announced the new stance on carbon credits when releasing the final report of his 2017 review of climate change policies on ­December 19.

“As flagged in 2015, the review considered the role of inter­national units and as a result the government has now given in-principle support for their use,” he said. “The final decision on the timing and appropriate quantity and quality limits will be taken by 2020 following further consultation and detailed analysis.”

Carbon credit schemes reward carbon abatement projects, such as tree planting in developing countries, potentially allowing Australian energy companies to buy the credits from the tree-planters to offset their own emissions. Business groups have strongly backed the move, arguing that there is no reason to waste efforts on higher-cost domestic abatement options when credible, less expensive alternatives are available abroad.

Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly has joined Mr Abbott in voicing strong opposition to the government’s move, while the Nationals’ George Christensen has previously expressed concerns about the international trading of carbon credits.

Mr Abbott said his position on international carbon credits remained the same as it had been when he was prime minister and party leader.

“I don’t support carbon trading, which is a carbon tax under a different name, and I certainly don’t support overseas carbon credits being available to Australian businesses,” he told The Australian. “That just means that Aussie consumers end up shovel­ling our money to foreign carbon traders, and we all know the ­potential for rorts there.”

Mr Frydenberg hit back last night, saying the role of international carbon credits had been on the table since Mr Abbott’s government announced in 2015 Australia’s Paris commitment.

‘’Since then we have conducted a major climate review in which industry groups representing energy intensive businesses across the economy including the BCA, AiG and the Minerals Council have made it very clear they strongly support the use of international permits," he said. “It is worth noting that Mr ­Abbott’s position on international permits is closer to the Greens than that of Australia’s big employers.”

In recent days, the Prime ­Minister has hailed his government’s national energy guarantee as a “real breakthrough” and key achievement in 2017.

Although the government won support for the guarantee in the Coalition partyroom, the latest development in the policy has inflamed the internal divisions that in 2009 saw Mr Abbott overthrow Mr Turnbull as opposition leader.

Mr Kelly said international carbon credits would put an extra cost burden on Australian businesses that would not be borne by competitors in countries such as China, the US and India.

“We’d be doing this at a time when every Australian business that uses energy is under enormous international competitive pressure through the higher cost of energy and with the company tax cuts in the US,” Mr Kelly said.

“Businesses in Australia are going to be struggling to compete internationally without us effectively putting on a further new green tax, forcing them to buy ­pieces of paper from overseas.”

Mr Kelly said the Abbott opposition’s criticisms of the Gillard government’s policy in 2011 remained relevant. “All those arguments are just as relevant today as they were back then,” he said, likening international carbon offset schemes to someone saying they were going to go on a diet over Christmas, but continuing to eat and paying a “diet offset”.

“You keep eating and someone from the Third World gets paid to starve,” he said.

Sky News commentator and former Abbott chief of staff Peta Credlin dubbed the timing of the announcement last month as a “getting out the trash” move, given it was released the day after the mid-year economic and fiscal update and the day of Mr Turnbull’s cabinet reshuffle.

In December 2010, Europol revealed it had arrested more than 100 people connected with carbon offset fraud, with links to organ­ised crime networks in Europe and the Middle East. Consequently, trading volumes on ­Europe’s carbon market fell by 90 per cent, with a loss to Euro­pean taxpayers of $6.6 billion.

In 2011, now Foreign Minister Julie Bishop wrote an opinion ­article attacking the then Gillard government’s policy of support for international carbon credits.

“It is naive at best for the prime minister to assume that such a scheme will emerge, given the clear signals internationally that major emitting nations are moving away from trading in carbon credits,” Ms Bishop wrote.

“Of more concern is that Julia Gillard appears blithely or wilfully unconcerned about the fraud and criminal activity that has beset trading in carbon credits.”

Asked whether her views had changed, and whether she supported the Turnbull government’s policy of in-principle support, Ms Bishop said in 2011 there had been widespread alle­gations of fraud in relation to international carbon credits.

“Since then, an international framework has been established through the Paris Agreement which provides unprecedented transparency, accountability and global co-operation on governance issues,” she said.

“The government is working to reduce emissions and meet our international obligations under the Paris Agreement through a broad range of emissions reduction policies and initiatives.

“We support, in principle, the use of international permits as part of our comprehensive suite of policies.”

SOURCE

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