A fun bit of Warmism

A rather attractive woman at a British regional university that was originally a school of art has put out an article (below) in which she compares the arguments put out by climate skeptics to the self-justifications used by criminals. So the intent is clearly derogatory.

She offers no numerical estimate of how similar the two types of statement are, however, so the article lapses into pointlessness or at best arbitrariness.

She classifies skeptical arguments quite well and clearly regards them all as illegitimate in some way -- but she offers no evidence or argument -- not even a reference -- for that opinion.

She appears to rely on the old "97% consenus" tale but has obviously not read the foundational paper for that claim  -- by John Cook et al.  I will quote her just one sentence from that paper: "66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW".  In other words only ONE THIRD of climate scientists could be shown to support global warming.  That's  a long way from 97%.  Richard Tol has more on that.

I will resist blonde jokes and simply observe that there are certainly some dim bulbs among Warmists


Climate Change Counter Movement NeutralizationTechniques: A Typology to Examine the Climate Change Counter Movement

Ruth E. McKie


Abstract

The Climate Change Counter Movement has been a topic of interest for social scientists and environmentalists for the past 25 years (Dunlap and McCright, 2015). This research uses the sociology of crime and deviance to analyze the numerous arguments used by climate change counter movement organizations.

Content analysis of 805 statements made by climate change counter movement organizations reveals that the theory "Techniques of Neutralization" (Sykes and Matza, American Sociological Review 22(6):664, 1957) can help us better understand the arguments adopted by these organizations.

Taking two observations from two time points, the author examine not only the composition of the messaging adopted by Climate Change Counter Movement (CCCM)organization, but how these messages have changed over time. In all, there were 1,435 examples of CCCM neutralization techniques adopted by CCCM organizations across these two points in time. This examination of the movement provides valuable insight into the CCCM and the subsequent environmental harm that is partly facilitated by theiractions.

SOURCE





The Modern Automobile Must Die. If we want to solve climate change, there's no other option

First they came for your plastic bags, then your straws, then your balloons… Now your cars!  Fat chance they have. Around half of the passenger automobiles sold in America today are SUVs.  But SUVs are big and heavy so can't go far on batteries.  And even normal cars can't go far on batteries in Northern winters as heating is a big battery drainer too

Germany was supposed to be a model for solving global warming. In 2007, the country’s government announced that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the year 2020. This was the kind of bold, aggressive climate goal scientists said was needed in all developed countries. If Germany could do it, it would prove the target possible.

So far, Germany has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 27.7 percent—an astonishing achievement for a developed country with a highly developed manufacturing sector. But with a little over a year left to go, despite dedicating $580 billion toward a low-carbon energy system, the country “is likely to fall short of its goals for reducing harmful carbon-dioxide emissions,” Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday. And the reason for that may come down not to any elaborate solar industry plans, but something much simpler: cars.

“At the time they set their goals, they were very ambitious,” Patricia Espinosa, the United Nations’ top climate change official, told Bloomberg. “What happened was that the industry—particularly the car industry—didn’t come along.”

Changing the way we power our homes and businesses is certainly important. But as Germany’s shortfall shows, the only way to achieve these necessary, aggressive emissions reductions to combat global warming is to overhaul the gas-powered automobile and the culture that surrounds it. The only question left is how to do it.

In 2010, a NASA study declared that automobiles were officially the largest net contributor of climate change pollution in the world. “Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it,” the study read. “In contrast, the industrial and power sectors release many of the same gases—with a larger contribution to [warming]—but they also emit sulfates and other aerosols that cause cooling by reflecting light and altering clouds.”

In other words, the power generation sector may have emitted the most greenhouse gases in total. But it also released so many sulfates and cooling aerosols that the net impact was less than the automobile industry, according to NASA.

Since then, developed countries have cut back on those cooling aerosols for the purpose of countering regular air pollution, which has likely increased the net climate pollution of the power generation industry. But according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, “collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all U.S. emissions,” while “in total, the U.S. transportation sector—which includes cars, trucks, planes, trains, ships, and freight—produces nearly thirty percent of all US global warming emissions ... .”

In fact, transportation is now the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States—and it has been for two years, according to an analysis from the Rhodium Group.

There’s a similar pattern happening in Germany. Last year, the country’s greenhouse gas emissions decreased as a whole, “largely thanks to the closure of coal-fired power plants,” according to Reuters. Meanwhile, the transportation industry’s emissions increased by 2.3 percent, “as car ownership expanded and the booming economy meant more heavy vehicles were on the road.” Germany’s transportation sector remains the nation’s second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but if these trends continue, it will soon become the first.

Clearly, the power generation industry is changing its ways. So why aren’t carmakers following suit?

To American eyes, Germany may look like a public transit paradise. But the country also has a flourishing car culture that began over a hundred years ago and has only grown since then.

Behind Japan and the United States, Germany is the third-largest automobile manufacturer in the world—home to BMW, Audi, Mercedes Benz, and Volkswagen.* These brands, and the economic prosperity they’ve brought to the country, shape Germany’s cultural and political identities. “There is no other industry as important,” Arndt Ellinghorst, the chief of Global Automotive Research at Evercore, told CNN.

A similar phenomenon exists in the United States, where gas-guzzlers symbolize nearly every cliche point of American pride: affluence, capability for individual expression, and personal freedoms. Freedom, in particular, “is not a selling point to be easily dismissed,” Edward Humes wrote in The Atlantic in 2016. “This trusty conveyance, always there, always ready, on no schedule but its owner’s. Buses can’t do that. Trains can’t do that. Even Uber makes riders wait.”

It’s this cultural love of cars—and the political influence of the automotive industry—that has so far prevented the public pressure necessary to provoke widespread change in many developed nations. But say those barriers didn’t exist. How could developed countries tweak their automobile policies to solve climate change?

For Germany to meet emissions targets, “half of the people who now use their cars alone would have to switch to bicycles, public transport, or ride-sharing,” Heinrich Strößenreuther, a Berlin-based consultant for mobility strategies told YaleEnvironment360’s Christian Schwägerl last fall. That would require drastic policies, like having local governments ban high-emitting cars in populated places like cities. (In fact, Germany’s car capital, Stuttgart, is considering it.) It would also require large-scale government investments in public transportation infrastructure: “A new transport system that connects bicycles, buses, trains, and shared cars, all controlled by digital platforms that allow users to move from A to B in the fastest and cheapest way—but without their own car,” Schwägerl said.

One could get away with more modest infrastructure investments if governments required carmakers to make their vehicle fleets more fuel-efficient, thereby burning less petroleum. The problem is that most automakers seek to meet those requirements by developing electric cars. If those cars are charged with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, they create “more emissions than a car that burns petrol,” energy storage expert Dénes Csala pointed out last year. “For such a switch to actually reduce net emissions, the electricity that powers those cars must be renewable.”

The most effective solution would be to combine these policies. Governments would require drastic improvements in fuel efficiency for gas-powered vehicles, while investing in renewable-powered electric car infrastructure. At the same time, cities would overhaul their public transportation systems, adding more bikes, trains, buses and ride-shares. Fewer people would own cars.

At one point, the U.S. was well on its way toward some of these changes. In 2012, President Barack Obama’s administration implemented regulations requiring automakers to nearly double the fuel economy of passenger vehicles by the year 2025. But the Trump administration announced a rollback of those regulations earlier this month. Their intention, they said, is to “Make Cars Great Again.”

The modern cars they’re seeking to preserve, and the way we use them, are far from great. Of course, there’s the climate impact—the trillions in expected economic damage from extreme weather and sea-level rise caused in part by our tailpipes. But 53,000 Americans also die prematurely from vehicle pollution each year, and accidents are among the leading causes of death in the United States. “If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered,” Humes wrote. It’s getting more dangerous by the day.

SOURCE





Another Greenie nuisance

In recent months, a new and controversial climate activist has surfaced in the media. Richard Wiles has quickly become the go-to commentator for news stories surrounding a series of copycat lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies liable for the effects of climate change.

On the surface, Mr. Wiles appears to be a well-meaning climate expert.

But an Energy In Depth investigation reveals his involvement in the larger coordinated scheme to attack energy companies and force the industry to pay for global warming.

Wiles is involved in all aspects of the climate litigation campaign – from running a news outlet dedicated to promoting the lawsuits and coordinating a social media effort to attack the industry, to overseeing the research utilized in many of the lawsuits and pressuring additional cities to bring cases of their own.

Richard Wiles heads Climate Liability News (CLN), a dark-money “news” site set up in 2017 to promote climate lawsuits across the country.

Though CLN doesn’t disclose its funders, its founding editor is Lynn Zinser, a transplant from InsideClimate News who worked on the original #ExxonKnew articles, which were paid for by the Rockefeller Family Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The Rockefellers are key players behind both the #ExxonKnew and climate litigation campaigns. Coincidentally, CLN just happens to have a unique page on its website dedicated to advancing this fringe environmentalist effort.

Kert Davies and Alyssa Johl, a former attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), serve alongside Wiles on the CLN board of directors.

Davies and members of CIEL attended a secret meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund in January 2016, which sought to “delegitimize” ExxonMobil and portray it as a “corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”

Behind the scenes, Wiles facilitates this “news” site through a 501(c)3 organization called Climate Communications & Law.

Established in 2017, the organization has no website and no publicly available financial disclosures to the IRS (form 990s).

It appears to serve as a shell organization for other powerful players to funnel undisclosed funds to CLN, which means it serves as a de facto public relations component of #ExxonKnew. CC&L is operated out of Wiles’ own home.

Wiles also directs the Center for Climate Integrity, a project that “supports meritorious climate cases aimed at holding fossil fuel companies and other climate polluters liable for the damages they have caused.”

This support includes coordinated social media posts with #ExxonKnew, an initiative by 350.org, and a PR campaign that is pressuring other cities like Houston and Miami to bring lawsuits of their own.

These tactics seem to stem directly from the agenda at the aforementioned Rockefeller Family Fund meeting in 2016:

Part of the memo for the January 2016 meeting at the offices of the Rockefeller Family Fund where activists plotted their #ExxonKnew strategy

Not only is Wiles leading a PR campaign in support of these lawsuits, he also oversaw the research utilized in many of the cases seeking damages from fossil fuel companies.

Wiles is the founder of Climate Central, a Rockefeller-funded organization that researches and reports on the impacts of climate change.

Between 2008-2017, Wiles served as the organization’s Sr. Vice President for Strategic Communications and Research, where he supervised numerous studies cited in the lawsuits represented by Sher Edling.

Climate Central has been involved in the conspiracy to delegitimize the fossil fuel industry from the very beginning: Claudia Tebaldi, a climate statistician for Climate Central, attended the now infamous La Jolla conference on behalf of the organization in 2012.

Portrayed by the media as a dispassionate expert, Richard Wiles is a deeply ingrained collaborator in the climate conspiracy against the energy industry.

He is facilitating a coordinated PR campaign and running a “news” organization to further these baseless attacks, alongside some of the most well-documented #ExxonKnew conspirators.

He even oversaw research conducted after the La Jolla Conference that was later used in the very lawsuits he continues to promote.

Wiles has managed to operate multiple facets of the campaign to undermine the industry while maintaining a public perception as an outside expert.

It’s unclear if Mr. Wiles has any other notable affiliations with the climate litigation campaign, but the additional investigation may yet reveal more to this story.

SOURCE




‘The Time For Action Is Now’: Zinke Orders California To Stop Wasting Farmers’ Water

Sacramento-San Joaquin DeltaInterior Secretary Ryan Zinke directed staff to draft a plan within 15 days that would “maximize water supply deliveries” to farmers south of California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, The Sacramento Bee reported.

California’s State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) is holding public hearings Tuesday on a proposal that would divert less water from the San Joaquin River for use in farms and roughly 3 million households.

The SWRCB wants to increase the amount of water flowing from the river into the ocean in order to help fish populations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta recover from historically low numbers.

“The State of California is now proposing additional unacceptable restrictions that further reduce the Department’s ability to deliver water to Federal contractors,” Zinke wrote in an Aug. 17 memo to department staff, according to The Sacramento Bee.

“The time for action is now,” the Interior secretary wrote, insisting that more water should be made available south of the delta for use by farms, homes, and businesses.

Further limiting Californian’s use of the water would force thousands to look for a supply underground, straining the state’s already depleted aquifers, critics of the state’s plan say.

Environmentalists oppose the secretary’s plan.

“It’s indicative of a more bullying and hysterical tone,” Natural Resources Defense Council California water program director Doug Obegi told the Los Angeles Times.

The fight between the Trump administration and California over the state’s water policy ratcheted up recently as result of record wildfires sweeping through the state. President Donald Trump has blamed “bad environmental laws” for adding to the wildfires’ severity.

Environmentalists and agriculture interests have fought over the appropriate use for water in the San Joaquin River. Farmers argue that the water is needed for irrigation and to sate California’s high demand for water.

Environmentalists say diverting water from flowing into the delta is harming stocks of fish, particularly the endangered delta smelt.

SOURCE 





Marc Morano: My Viral Climate Change Video Was Smeared as Fake News. Here Are the Facts.

Morano attacker Dana Nuccitelli is a rather crafty Warmist.  He usually backs up his statements by a display of "facts".  When you trace those facts back however you find that the "facts" are just conclusions (read: opinions) of his fellow Warmists

An environmental scientist who writes a column for The Guardian has claimed that my video on climate change “spreads climate denial misinformation” to millions of viewers on Facebook. Not so.

Here is my point-by-point rebuttal to Dana Nuccitelli’s claims in the British newspaper based on my video, which has attracted more than 8 million views and 139,000 shares on Facebook. The video has so alarmed climate activists that they’re using it to pressure Facebook to ban “climate deniers.”

Claim: “Basically, [Marc Morano’s] critique is that the study sample size was too small to make a conclusive determination about the level of expert consensus. That’s a valid point … ”

Response: So Nuccitelli admits my point about “77 anonymous” scientists making up the alleged 97 percent consensus is “a valid point.” Good. Let’s move on.

Claim: “In fact, the authors of seven separate [climate] consensus studies using a variety of approaches (some with very large sample sizes) teamed up in 2016 to publish a paper concluding that the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is between 90 and 100 percent. So, this critique is invalid when considering all the available consensus research.”

Response: Climate Depot, the website I founded, has covered and debunked the claims of these so-called “consensus” studies, which were a rehash of the same claims but packaged together to appear comprehensive. Chapter 3 of my book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” is devoted to debunking the 97 percent claims.

As I have detailed before: These claims “really confirm that it is easier to get papers published if they support the narrative of man-made global warming.”

Responding to these “consensus” surveys, I told the Media Research Center: “These types of ‘consensus’ surveys are meant to provide talking points to politicians and the media in order to crush dissenting voices and ban skeptics from the mainstream media. It frees the climate crisis promoter from having to research any scientific points and instead allows them to say, ‘90 percent of scientists agree. Case closed!’”

Nuccitelli, as seen here and here, has a history of skewing climate science to fit his political narrative.

Claim: “Morano also critiques the consensus study that my colleagues (including John Cook) and I published in 2013. He does so simply by quoting economist Richard Tol saying our 97 percent figure ‘was pulled from thin air.’ Tol argued that the methodology in our study was flawed, but when we applied his critiques in a follow-up paper published in 2014, we found that the consensus was still 97 [percent, plus or minus 1 percent].”

Response: Here are Tol’s own words on Cook’s claim of 97 percent consensus, and readers can judge whether I accurately quoted him:

The 97 percent estimate is bandied about by basically everybody. I had a close look at what this study really did. As far as I can see, the estimate just crumbles when you touch it. None of the statements in the papers [is] supported by the data that’s in the paper. The 97 percent is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.

Tol continued to be unimpressed with Cook’s claims even after his follow-up paper published in 2014. In 2015, Tol again ripped Cook’s continued claims of a 97 percent consensus. “Cook’s analysis is a load of old bollocks,” he wrote.

(I debated Cook in 2015 at the U.N. Paris climate summit. Listen here.)

Claim: “In short, Morano’s only evidence to dispute the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is to quote an economist who agrees the consensus is 90 to 100 percent, and that the experts are correct that humans are responsible for global warming.”

Response: Tol has pushed back on claims that he cited a consensus of 91 percent.

PolitiFact to Tol in 2015: “The 91 percent endorsement rate is a direct quote from your paper: ‘The headline endorsement rate would be 91 percent in that case.’ (Cook cites it multiple times in his reply to your paper.)”

Tol rebuffed this, writing back to PolitiFact: “Do check the grammar: ‘would […] in that case’ does in no way indicate my agreement with the number. In fact, I make it very clear that any number based on Cook’s data is unreliable.”

In addition, Nuccitelli’s claim in The Guardian that my “only evidence” is Tol is not correct. In the 2-minute Facebook video, I alluded to Tol’s comment and to the other key “consensus” study. But in my book, I devote a whole chapter to debunking all of the various 97 percent consensus claims.

Also see this and this. And past climate “consensuses” have changed dramatically, as seen here and here.

Claim: “Morano claims that we’re not actually in the midst of the hottest period on record, and that ‘hottest year’ claims are ‘merely political statements’ because for example, he claims, scientists can’t say with 100 percent certainty that 2016 was hotter than 2015 due to the margin of uncertainty in the data. This claim is similar to one made on Fox News that earned a ‘Pants on Fire’ rating from PolitiFact based on consultation with climate scientists. The years 2014 through 2017 are indeed the four hottest years on record, outside the range of uncertainty.”

Response: First off, citing PolitiFact as a climate science authority is beyond the pale, even for The Guardian. Second, the media has been forced to admit that “hottest year” claims are statistical noise.

In 2015, the Associated Press issued a “clarification,” stating in part:

The story also reported that 2014 was the hottest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, but did not include the caveat that other recent years had average temperatures that were almost as high—and they all fall within a margin of error that lessens the certainty that any one of the years was the hottest.

“Hottest year” claims are purely political statements designed to persuade the public that the government needs to take action on man-made climate change.

In Chapter 7, my book deals with “hottest year” claims and their statistical significance.

Claim: “Morano argues that the experts are wrong because there are hundreds of factors influencing Earth’s climate, and that carbon dioxide ‘is one of these factors that gets essentially drowned out, and you can’t distinguish its effect from natural variability.’ That claim is entirely false, as elegantly illustrated in this graphic created by Bloomberg.”

Response: The claim here is that carbon dioxide can have a warming impact on the atmosphere, but this does not mean CO2 is the control knob of the climate.

Philip Stott, University of London’s professor emeritus of biogeography, rebuts the notion that carbon dioxide is the main climate change driver, writing:

As I have said, over and over again, the fundamental point has always been this: Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets.

Climate is the most complex coupled nonlinear chaotic system known to man. Of course, there are human influences in it, nobody denies that. But what outcome will they get by fiddling with one variable (CO2) at the margins? I’m sorry, it’s scientific nonsense.

Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, a pioneer in development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute, has declared (as quoted in my book): “I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached.”

Claim: “Human-caused global warming now [is] far outside the range of natural variability. In fact, we’re now warming global temperatures more than 20 times faster than Earth’s fastest natural climate changes.”

Response: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever points out that “.8 degrees is what we’re discussing in global warming. [Just] .8 degrees. If you ask people in general what it is, they think—it’s 4 or 5 degrees. They don’t know it is so little.”

Climatologist Pat Michaels explained that in any case the world’s temperature “should be near the top of the record given the record only begins in the late 19th century when the surface temperature was still reverberating from the Little Ice Age.”

“We are creating great anxiety without it being justified … there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic,” award-winning climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

As climatologist Roy Spencer wrote in 2016:

Global warming and climate change, even if it is 100 percent caused by humans, is so slow that it cannot be observed by anyone in their lifetime. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and other natural disasters have yet to show any obvious long-term change. This means that in order for politicians to advance policy goals (such as forcing expensive solar energy on the masses or creating a carbon tax), they have to turn normal weather disasters into ‘evidence’ of climate change.

University of Pennsylvania geologist Robert Giegengack, as I write in my book, noted in 2014:  “None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.”

Claim: “And of course, climate scientists have observed human fingerprints all over climate change … ”

Response: As Spencer wrote, “There is no fingerprint of human-caused versus naturally-caused climate change … To claim the changes are ‘unprecedented’ cannot be demonstrated with reliable data, and are contradicted by some published paleoclimate data which suggests most centuries experience substantial warming or cooling.”

Richard Lindzen, an MIT climate scientist, said that believing CO2 controls the climate “is pretty close to believing in magic.” Climate Depot revealed the real way they find the “fingerprint” of CO2.

Nuccitelli’s “fingerprint” argument in The Guardian echoes claims by the Associated Press from 2017, when AP science reporter Seth Borenstein wrote: “There’s a scientifically accepted method for determining if some wild weather event has the fingerprints of man-made climate change, and it involves intricate calculations. Those could take weeks or months to complete, and then even longer to be checked by other scientists.”

I responded to Borenstein’s claims by writing that he seems to believe “there is some kind of arcane black box that finds the fingerprint of man-made global warming” and it is available only to a select few.

Claim: “It would be absurd to take Marc Morano’s word over the evidence published in peer-reviewed studies by climate scientists at NASA and other scientific institutions around the world.”

Response: I wholeheartedly agree. There is no reason to take the word of either The Guardian’s Nuccitelli or me. We have science, data, and the geologic history of the Earth to handle that.

Current NASA climate claims (under Gavin Schmidt and formerly James Hansen) are steeped in politics and funding. Former NASA scientists have criticized the agency (see here and here).

Other prominent scientists reject carbon dioxide fears.

Ivy League geologist Robert Giegengack, former chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke out against fears of rising CO2 impacts promoted by Al Gore and others. Giegengack noted that “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.”

He explained:

[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa. … It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2.

In 2014, Giegengack told Climate Depot: “The Earth has experienced very few periods when CO2 was lower than it is today.”

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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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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