Dyer: Migrants will multiply with global warming

Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer is a good military historian but he is not a deep thinker. He just parrots below the old line that global warming will lead to food shortages.  He thinks that 2 degrees of warming will cause Africans to starve. He totally ignores the effect of higher CO2 levels on crops.  If the desperately prophesied coincidence of slightly higher temperatures and elevated CO2 does arrive, crops will thrive.  Crops LIKE warmth and LOVE CO2.  A warmer climate should in fact cause Africans to eat unusually well.

It is in fact in Africa that we already see some of that.  The Sahel desert area has greened noticeably in recent decades as global CO2 level have risen. Elevated ambient CO2 levels enable plants to survive with less water -- look it up, Gwynne.  It's all to do with stomata.

CO2 levels are still steadily rising even though temperatures have been pretty flat in recent decades


Lucky old Italy just got two Donald Trumps for the price of one.

One of the big winners in last Sunday’s Italian election was the Five-Star Movement, whose 31-year-old leader Luigi di Maio has promised to stop sending out rescue boats to save migrants from drowning when their flimsy craft sink halfway across the Mediterranean. A “sea taxi service”, he calls it, and promises to send all the surviving illegal immigrants home.

So does Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League, the other big winner in the election. “I’m sick of seeing immigrants in hotels and Italians who sleep in cars,” Salvini told supporters at a recent rally in Milan. He pledges to send 150,000 illegal migrants home in his first year in government.

What we are seeing now, however, is a foretaste of the time when the migrant flows grow very large and the politics gets really brutal. In the not too distant future, the Mediterranean Sea and the Mexican border will separate the temperate world, where the climate is still tolerable and there is still enough food, from the sub-tropical and tropical worlds of killer heat and dwindling food.

This is a regular subject of confidential discussions in various strategic planning cells in European governments, and also in the grown-up parts of the U.S. government. Ten years ago a senior officer in the intelligence section of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff told me that the U.S. army expected to be ordered by Congress to close the Mexican border down completely within the next 20 years. And he was quite explicit: that meant shooting to kill.

Global warming will hit the countries closer to the equator far harder than the fortunate countries of the temperate zone, and the main casualty will be food production in the tropics and the sub-tropics.

So the hungry millions will start to move, and the borders of the richer countries in the temperate parts of the world will slam shut to keep them out: the United States, the European Union, Russia, South Africa, Australia. If you think the politics is ugly now, just wait.

Of course, a miracle could happen. There could be early and very deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, so most of the catastrophe never arrives. But I’m having trouble even believing in the Easter Bunny any more. This is harder.

SOURCE




US Appeals Court Refuses to Dismiss Unusual Global Warming Suit

It would be GREAT to get this into court.  The plaintiffs would have to prove damage

A federal appeals court in San Francisco on Wednesday refused to dismiss a lawsuit against the U.S. government by 21 young people who say climate change deprives them of their constitutional rights.

The youngsters, between the ages of 10 and 21, sued the Obama administration in 2015. They have carried their case over to the Trump administration, which is seeking to have it tossed out.

The three-judge panel ruled Wednesday that the administration failed to meet what they call the "high bar" under federal law to have the case dismissed.

The group said U.S. administrations as far back as Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s have ignored the dangers caused by carbon emissions and pollution — including climate change — taking away from their constitutional right to life, liberty and the ability to pursue wealth.

U.S. attorneys argue the case could lead to long and complicated litigation and a "constitutional crisis" involving the federal courts and the White House.

Chief Judge Sidney Thomas disagreed. "Litigation burdens are part of our legal system," he wrote. "Claims and remedies often are vastly narrowed as litigation proceeds. We have no reason to assume this case will be any different."

The Justice Department has not yet responded to the appeals court's decision.

An attorney representing the young people called it "very exciting. It will be the first time that climate science and the federal government's role in creating the dangers will go on trial in a U.S. court."

SOURCE




Those fraudulent climate litigation shakedowns

Which aspects are most fraudulent? The cities’ lawsuits, junk science or bond offerings?

Paul Driessen

The ultra liberal enclaves of New York City and San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Marin, and Imperial Beach, California all claim to be deeply worried about manmade climate cataclysms. They detest petroleum, oppose pipelines, fracking and onshore and offshore drilling, and strongly support renewable energy and expensive electricity: already 17-18¢ a kilowatt-hour for families, rich and poor.

They also have huge government pension fund shortfalls (NYC alone has a pension debt of some $65 billion), and are suing BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhilips and Royal Dutch Shell. They’re gunning for a collective litigation windfall of several hundred billion dollars, to help bail them out. (They’d probably sue coal companies, too, but the Obama era war on coal drove many into bankruptcy.)

Their fundamental cause of action claims greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) from burning oil and natural gas are disrupting Earth’s climate and weather, causing heat waves and frigid winters, floods and droughts, more frequent and intense hurricanes, melting ice packs and rising seas – costing the cities billions of dollars for repairs and adaptation. The calamities pose an “existential threat” to the cities, humanity and our planet. If they’re not happening already, they will within decades, the litigants assert.

The oil companies have known about these risks for decades, the cities and counties continue, but hid the information from the public and failed to disclose it in annual reports, stock offerings and other documents. They are thus guilty of fraud, negligent and deliberate failure to warn, product design defects, trespass with dangerous pollutants, and being a public and private nuisance.

The litigants seek compensatory damages, abatement of the alleged nuisance, attorneys’ fees, punitive damages and disgorgement of corporate profits. NY Mayor Bill de Blasio also wants his city to divest from fossil fuels (which generate revenues for pension funds, and invest more in wind and solar, which require subsidies) and “bring the death knell” to the entire oil industry. It’s a classic shakedown.

Nice companies ya got there. Sure’d be a shame if something was to happen to ‘em.

The ironies are delicious – ripe for being exploited in courtrooms, Congress and courts of public opinion.

Start with the fraud allegations. Much to the chagrin of scientists who say humans are not causing climate cataclysms, these oil companies’ reports and press releases have frequently said fossil fuel emissions are a real concern, and the companies haven’t funded climate chaos skeptics for years. Where’s the fraud?

Compare that to Marin County, whose court pleadings assert a 99% risk of catastrophic storm surges and flooding, because of oil and gas combustion. San Mateo County cites a 93% likelihood of climate-related surges, floods and sewer overflows. San Francisco claims an “imminent risk of catastrophic storm surges.”

But SF’s 2017 municipal bond offering downplayed the risks, saying it is “unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding will occur.” Marin and San Mateo made similar statements to current and prospective bond investors. Ditto for other litigants and climate chaos claims. Their panicked concern about devastating climate impacts has suddenly vanished.

Courts don’t like forked tongues, prior inconsistent statements, duplicity or fraud. Neither do investors or SEC commissioners. Watching this lawsuit vs. bond offerings tar baby schizophrenia play out in court will be entertaining, and perhaps even one more reason to dismiss the frivolous lawsuit with prejudice.

It’s also ironic that the litigants claim the oil companies are causing local, state, national, international and planetary havoc – but wanted to sue in state courts, where they hoped to get friendlier judges and juries than they might in a federal venue. Boulder, Colorado’s city attorney also promoted that approach, in suggesting that this equally liberal town join the litigation, to “propel change” and “put a price on carbon.”

However, a Federal District judge has ruled that the case must be tried in federal courts, since the claims “depend on a global complex of geophysical cause and effect involving all nations of the planet.”

Add to that the unrelenting efforts by these cities, counties and states, climate activists and modelers, and various politicians to stifle debate, assert that 97% of scientists agree that climate change is manmade and dangerous, and even use racketeering laws and Spanish Inquisition tactics against climate chaos skeptics – while profiting handsomely from climate hysteria. But now they want to haul oil companies into court, where they must present real-world evidence, prove their case against fossil fuels, reply to weighty evidence that contradicts their assertions, and endure brutal cross-examination by defense attorneys.

It will be interesting to watch them try to silence defense witnesses and keep inconvenient evidence out.

Two new books, by Marc Morano and Gregory Wrightstone, offer superb laymen’s guides to the real science of climate change today and throughout Earth’s long history – and how difficult (nigh impossible) it will be for the litigants to prove their allegations: That today’s climate fluctuations are unprecedented. That they pose an imminent threat to people and planet. That humans and (plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide now control climate and weather processes, replacing the sun and other powerful natural forces that did so previously. That they can somehow separate and quantify human versus natural influences and impacts.

The cities and counties also want the courts to focus only on the alleged social, environmental and economic costs of carbon-based fuels and carbon dioxide emissions. They want no mention of the enormous benefits – to the cities, counties and their citizenry: lights, heat, clothing, transportation, communication, healthcare, employment, crops, parks, forests and much more. Indeed, a comprehensive, honest analysis shows the benefits of carbon exceed their costs by at least 50:1, to as much as 500:1.

The litigants demand that the targeted companies “disgorge” their profits. Perhaps the cities should first disgorge the trillions in benefits they received from using the companies’ products for the past century.

In the end, the case against the oil companies rests on bald assertions, selective evidence, revised and “homogenized” data, an assumption that industrialization caused modern global warming – and above all, computerized climate models that have been wrong about every temperature and other prediction. This may work in the “mainstream” media, universities and other liberal circles. It shouldn’t in a court of law.

As “logic of science” expert David Wojick observes, climate models are basically garbage in-garbage out, or GIGO: Input the assumption that rising CO2 levels cause climate change; output increasingly disastrous climate disruption scenarios. The process also involves constant circular reasoning: If all the drivers of climate change are assumed to be human-caused, all the observed changes must also be caused by humans.

That is how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change operates – and why we have so many disaster scenarios and demands for an immediate transition to renewable energy. It helps explain why these litigants oppose drilling, fracking and pipelines within their borders – but voice few concerns about the impacts of wind and solar installations on wildlife, habitats, and metals mining and processing in distant lands … or about the land, fertilizer and water demands, and CO2 emissions, associated with biofuels.

Two principles seem to guide the litigants: Whatever happens today or in the future – even if it happened many times in the past – is the oil companies’ fault, and it’s going to be catastrophic. Misrepresenting facts or failing to disclose relevant evidence violates anti-fraud laws – unless the cities and counties do it.

That is absurd. A lot is riding on these baseless climate lawsuits – and not just for the oil companies.

Every city, county, state, farm, manufacturer, hospital, business, worker and family whose operations, technologies, living standards, investments, pensions and hope for the future depend on the energy and petrochemicals that oil companies provide will be harmed by a court finding in favor of these litigants.

Every one of them should follow this case closely – and get involved deeply and personally in this crazy lawsuit, by intervening, providing evidence and expert witnesses, submitting amicus curiae briefs, and helping citizens, journalists and elected officials understand what is really at stake here. (Hint: It’s not Earth’s climate, which has changed often throughout history – beneficially, benignly or detrimentally.)

Via email





The Shocking True Story of How Global Warming Became the Biggest #FakeNews Scare of All

Here is this week’s latest in Climate Stupid:

Let’s “solve” climate change by halting economic growth, argues a paper from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, published in Nature Climate Change.

Texas Tech professor Katharine Hayhoe tells a summit in Edmonton, Canada that climate change is “the greatest humanitarian crisis of our times”; confides how shocked she was on discovering, six months into her marriage, that her husband did not believe in global warming. “You have somebody you respect and you also love and you also want to stay married. I said well, ‘Let’s talk about it.’” Apparently it took two years to convince him.

Activists at Cambridge University warn of “large scale disruption” if the university’s £6.3 billion endowment fund ignores their demands that it should divest itself of its fossil fuel investment holdings.

An ex-White-House staffer from the Obama era tells Washingtonian  about the time her date with a man came to a sudden end when he said he didn’t believe in global warming: “I started laughing, because I’m from Colorado and didn’t realize people actually didn’t believe in global warming. But he was serious.”

Climate industrial complex in UK has wasted £100 billion and shut down debate to no useful purpose, warns Peter Lilley – one of Margaret Thatcher’s former ministers.

‘Stop blaming both sides for America’s climate failures’, argues Guardian columnist. ‘The fault lies entirely with the GOP.’

‘Blame consumers not China for climate change‘, warns Clinton-Climate-Initiative-backed pressure group.

I could go on but I wouldn’t want to bore you. Or myself. When you’ve been covering the climate/environment/energy beat for as long as I have, every day is Groundhog Day. Every day it’s the same bunch of troughers, spivs, second-raters, crooks, liars, half-wits, chancers, bottom-feeders and eco-fascists churning out the same old propaganda…

But these scare stories and demands for action are so relentless and ubiquitous that they do invite an obvious question: how can all these different people – from politics, from academe, from the media, from business – possibly be all wrong?

Isn’t it maybe time we listened more carefully to what they have to say?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: No, no, no, no, no, no, NO!

Last week, I introduced you to the paper by Christopher Booker that explains why so many people – some of them highly ‘educated’ – can all be simultaneously wrong about so big an issue. They are all, Booker shows, the victims – or, if you prefer, the useful idiots – of a phenomenon known as ‘Groupthink.’

Groupthink was a phenomenon anatomized in the early Seventies by a U.S. sociologist called Irving Janis. As I explained in my piece, it has three rules:

Rule One. A group of people come to share a common view or belief that in some way is not properly based on reality.

Rule Two. Because their common view/belief cannot be subjected to external proof they have to reinforce its authority by claiming ‘consensus.’ The idea is to emphasize that all right-thinking people hold this view and that it is no longer open to challenge.

Rule Three: Anyone who disputes this ‘consensus’ must be excluded from the discussion: at best marginalized; at worst openly attacked or discredited.

I titled my piece The Shocking True Story of How Global Warming Became the Biggest #FakeNews Scare of All Time (Pt 1) a) because I wanted to grab your attention and b) because it’s true.

Even now, I find the chutzpah, the arrogance, the brazen dishonesty of those pushing this #FakeNews non crisis so utterly breathtaking I want to pinch myself in disbelief.

How do they get away with it? Because they can. Because they always have got away with it.

In this second part of my coverage of Booker’s illuminating paper, I want to give you some examples that show you how and why every day in the world of climate change scaremongering is Groundhog Day. Essentially, what you’ll come to realize is that the people who’ve been pushing this scam have been operating from the same playbook for well over three decades.

Inventing the ‘Consensus’

1992 was a long time ago. To give you an idea how long, the movies you may have watched in that year including Reservoir Dogs; The Crying Game; and The Bodyguard; the albums you bought – well I did – were the Orb’s UFOrb; Dr Dre’s The Chronic; Sugar’s Copper Blue. George HW Bush was U.S. president. We’re talking ancient history here. But one thing that remains fresh as a daisy is the paper written in that year by Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was titled “Global warming: the origin and nature of the alleged scientific consensus.”

No wonder Lindzen sounds so weary when he talks about this subject. He’s probably the world’s greatest professor of atmospheric physics. He’s been saying for over a quarter of a century that the whole global warming thing is a scam, but hardly anyone has been listening for reasons we’ll come to in a moment.

The flaws in the alarmist position Lindzen exposed in 1992 remain the same today: the global warming scare story depends on hopelessly inadequate computer models which place too much emphasis on man-made CO2 and which therefore produce a “disturbingly arbitrary” picture of the state of climate.

What Lindzen also noted in this paper was another thing that remains true today: the remarkable proclivity of all manner of diverse groups to leap on the climate bandwagon.

These include activist NGOs, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and the Union of Concerned Scientists; media organizations, such as the BBC, the New York Times and, as they then were, NBC, CBS and ABC; and Hollywood stars such as Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford who called for people to stop “researching” the warming threat and to “begin acting.”

This was the Groupthink pressure that prompted that previously skeptical George HW Bush White House to cave and, in 1989, authorize a staggering increase in the federal budget for climate change research. Over the next four years, this increased from just $134 million to a total of $2.8 billion.

Burning the Heretics

A key element in the survival of any Groupthink “consensus”, Janis noted, is that any disagreement must be ruthlessly suppressed.

Anyone who has dares to take on climate change Groupthink has to pay a terrible price. I don’t know a single scientist, journalist, or politician who has criticized the “consensus” and not been made to suffer personally.

The ruthlessness and zeal with which the alarmists pursue heretics borders on the psychotic. There is perhaps no more poignant, shocking, and dismal an example of this than the way Al Gore sought to destroy the reputation of the very man he had once claimed as his inspiration: Roger Revelle, the distinguished oceanographer at the University of California in San Diego. Revelle’s research into increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, Gore claimed in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, was what first alerted him to the “worst threat we have ever faced.”

What Gore hadn’t quite appreciated when he made his powerpoint propaganda movie was that, in the interim, his old teacher’s views on climate had changed.

In 1988, Revelle had written to (notoriously alarmist) Senator Tim Wirth: “We should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer.”

Revelle went still further in a 1991 article he wrote with fellow distinguished skeptic Dr. Fred Singer, then professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia.  Their article concluded: “the scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.”

Gore’s response to the inconvenient truth of his supposed mentor’s change of heart?

He pressured one of his associates to put out the story that Revelle was a sick old man with failing mental capacities who had been pressured by Singer into signing the article. This was later the basis of a libel suit, which Singer won.

Gore – by then Vice President of the USA – also rang ABC News’ Ted Koppel urging him to expose Singer as being in the pay of sinister fossil-fuel interests which were funding an “anti-environment” movement. To his credit, Koppel called Gore’s bluff by reporting the Vice President’s attempted dirty tricks on air.

If you’ve read books like my own Watermelons, much of this will be familiar territory.

But in some ways that’s the most amazing thing of all about this extraordinary affair, which must surely represent the biggest peacetime waste of taxpayers money in history, the biggest scientific scandal in history, and the most extravagant and widely promulgated lie in history: the sheer brazenness of these tricksters’ enterprise.

Time and again, their junk science has been shredded, their lies exposed, their dirty tricks revealed.

Yet still they continue to get away with murder thanks to the power of Groupthink.

Too many people are still inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Too many people are distracted by the fallacious Appeal to Authority: “Who do you trust? 97 percent of the world’s scientists or Breitbart‘s James Delingpole?”

Well I know the answer to that last one. But then, like you, I’m not stupid.

SOURCE





Australia: ‘Kill Climate Deniers’ – Now Showing at a Sydney Theatre

Jennifer Marohasy

JUST two generations back, in the 1960s, mainstream Australian society shunned both unmarried pregnant women and also homosexuals. They were loathed, and it would have been considered reasonable for the local police to turn-a-blind eye should misfortune befall members of either group – should they be killed.

In my opinion, human-beings are not naturally hateful, though powerful institutions often look to squash dissent by turning the tribe against groups with certain characteristics – particularly those likely to possess special knowledge.

The loathing of unmarried pregnant women and homosexuals back in the 1960s was a consequence of preaching, particularly by the Catholic Church. During this period the church, while preaching abstinence, employed thousands of priests active in the community, many of whom were secretly molesting young boys and girls. No doubt getting some of them pregnant, and grooming others to be their homosexual lovers. Key findings from the recent child sexual abuse royal commission include: abuse mostly occurred in religious institutions (58%), most victims were male (64%), most of those perpetrating the abuse were male (94%), the average age of the victims is now 53 years.

After some decades, finally, Australian society has woken-up and owned-up to this scandal. Times have changed, and unmarried pregnant women and homosexuals are now embraced.

It is my observation that homosexuality is now almost revered; at least by those who consider themselves progressive, trend-setters, supporters of the arts – our most virtuous. So, what does it say about this same group, that they now actively support hatred of so-called climate change deniers?

The arts community successfully sought government funding for a play entitled ‘Kill Climate Deniers’ that has just now opened at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney.

What special knowledge could so-called ‘climate deniers’ possess that would turn the now most virtuous in our society so against us – against my group.

SOURCE

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

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