Hysteria reminiscent of Hitler from Jerry Brown.  Says: "Since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition"

The facts as advised by Meterorologist Joe Bastardi:

Statewide most recently  2006, 2005, 2003 were all warmer. Here are my previous links on this:

This  May 17 on wildfires
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/56002-before-the-fact-why-another-big-wildfire-season-may-be-on-the-way

Then May 19 on heat
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/56059-more-reason-for-a-climate-ambulance-chaser-watch-summer

And again June 1! showing the changes are natural
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/56287-the-past-is-once-again-giving-valuable-hints-to-the-future-this-summers-texas-heat

Climate historian Tony Heller notes that California has always had massive forest fires.  One in 1868 burned up much of the Santa Cruz mountains. (https://www.newspapers.com/image/50915615/?terms=forest%2Bfires )




With more than 20 active fires small and very large tearing across the state, California Gov. Jerry Brown warned today that “nature is powerful, and we’re not on the side of nature,” and that devastating blazes are "the new normal."

The Carr Fire in Shasta and Trinity counties, which was sparked July 23 by a non-criminal vehicle fire at Highway 299 and Carr Powerhouse Road west of Redding, Calif., has burned more than 115,000 acres and was 35 percent contained as of this morning. It's now ranked as the sixth most destructive wildfire in the state's history after killing six and destroying more than a thousand homes.

Cal Fire said that "steep terrain, erratic winds, and previously unburned fuels are contributing to spot fire potential." More than 4,100 firefighters are battling the blaze.

Along with a bulldozer contract employee and a Redding firefighter killed in the Carr Fire, the captain of a wildland hotshots team and a Cal Fire heavy equipment operator have been killed in the Ferguson fire burning near Yosemite in Mariposa County. The more than 62,000-acre blaze was 39 percent contained this afternoon.

Dreaming of Three Californias

At a state Office of Emergency Services press conference today, Brown said firefighters would have to adapt to increasingly severe wildfires in the years to come because of climate change.

“We’re fighting nature with the amount of material we’re putting in the environment, and that material traps heat, and the heat fosters fires, and the fires keep burning," he said.

The governor added that "since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse and that’s the way it is."

“Some people don’t want to accept that, some just outright deny it," Brown continued. "I don’t say it with any great joy here – we’re in for a very rough ride. It’s going to get expensive. It’s going to get dangerous, and we have to apply all our creativity to make the best of what is going to be an increasingly bad situation, not just for California, but for people all over America and all over the world.”

Brown said the state's budget would also have to figure in the cost of increased fire fury in the upcoming years. “So far, this fire activity is a small part of our very large budget, but it is growing and it will continue to grow as we adapt to the changing weather,” he said.

The governor said that steps to combat global warming can still, eventually, “shift the weather back to where it historically was.”

SOURCE 





Anti-Fracking Groups Pull Fast One On Media By Repackaging Debunked ‘Health’ Report

frackingMoms Clean Air Force released a new “report” this week that alleges widespread health harms from oil and natural gas development based entirely on an array of debunked talking points and anecdotal accounts, rather than actual air measurements.

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because two other anti-fracking groups, Earthworks and Clean Air Task Force (CATF), released essentially the exact same “report” just two weeks ago, utilizing an all-too-common “Keep It In the Ground” repackaging strategy designed to generate headlines rather than contribute to the honest scientific debate on the issue of fracking and public health.

And you don’t have to take our word for it.

The “new” Moms Clean Air Force report even notes, “This report builds on data and analysis from the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and Earthworks quantifying the health impacts of oil and gas operations across the U.S.”

Rather than saying the report “builds” on CATF and Earthworks “data,” a more accurate description would have been that the report recycles that report’s long-debunked anti-fracking scare tactics.

As the following side-by-side comparisons show, the reports are nearly identical.

Both reports’ introductions prominently feature Earthworks’ infamous “Threat Map,” which merely identifies the fact that many Americans live near oil and gas development.

The bodies of each report are comprised of anecdotal accounts from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado, along with nearly identical Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) images that Earthworks has admitted provide no scientific evidence of harmful emissions.

The reports’ conclusions are also strikingly similar, calling for increased oil and gas setbacks and — shocker — more federal regulations.

The fact remains that neither of these reports includes any original air quality data to verify their conclusions. And unfortunately for these groups, the timing of the anecdotal Washington County, Pa., profiles in both reports couldn’t be worse, as new Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Pa. Department of Health (DOH) air monitoring reports were released last week that found that Washington County oil and gas emissions are protective of public health.

This latest Moms Clean Air Force report – in true KIITG fashion – is anything but new. And since the group chose to release a report with nothing new to add to the conversation, here’s the original debunk of this CATF/Earthworks “report” that EID published two weeks ago:

SOURCE 





‘It Would Save 12,000 Lives’: Andrew Wheeler Stumps Dem Senator Chastising Trump Admin For Backing Off Obama-Era Fuel Standards

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) acting administrator Andrew Wheeler pushed back against assertions that a draft Trump administration proposal reducing fuel efficiency standards would help industry while harming Americans.

Wheeler testified in front of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Wednesday less than a month after he took control of the EPA. Wheeler’s appearance marks the first time he has sat before Congress since taking over the agency.

Democrat Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts tried to corner Wheeler, accusing the acting administrator and the Trump administration of acting in the best interests of oil companies to the detriment of consumers and the environment.

“Over the lifetime of the current fuel-economy standards, consumers will save $1 trillion on gasoline and will keep $12 billion barrels of oil in the ground,” Markey said at the beginning of his questioning. “That’s the simple formula for fuel-economy. You save consumers money and you save the planet at the same time.”

The Obama administration placed increasingly strict fuel-economy standards on car manufacturers’ vehicle fleets in 2012. Under the Obama-era rule, a carmaker’s fleet of vehicle models must average 39 miles per gallon in 2020 and 50 miles per gallon in 2025. The Trump administration is considering freezing the fuel efficiency standards at 2020 levels, according to Bloomberg.

No official proposal on the matter has been made.

The oil industry is “scared to death that $1 trillion will stay stranded in the pockets of consumers, and that is why the Trump administration is moving to roll back these standards,” Markey said before asking Wheeler if leaving the standards in place would result in more demand and consumption of oil.

“I believe the analysis shows that more oil would be consumed,” Wheeler answered. “But it would also save 12,000 lives and $500 billion.”

Markey recognized that Wheeler was correct about an increase in oil consumption but ignored the second part of Wheeler’s answer. The senator then asked if the Trump proposal would increase the price of gas relative to the current standards, citing the nonprofit environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists that claimed the Trump proposal would cost drivers $20 billion in extra fuel costs in 2025.

“That I do not know. I know that we have $500 billion in savings to the American consumers under the proposal,” Wheeler answered.

SOURCE 





#Fake News: We Could Have Stopped Global Warming In 1980s

New York Times Magazine dedicated an entire issue to an article called “Losing Earth” that alleges humanity was on the cusp of stopping man-made global warming in the 1980s, but then didn’t.

Writer Nathaniel Rich narrative focuses around the failed efforts of “a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming.”

“Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed,” Rich wrote in his 30,000-word article published Wednesday after much hype.

The problem is — many policy experts and journalists aren’t buying Rich’s narrative.

University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke, Jr., who’s been involved in climate policy for decades, said the magazine article “brings together alternative history with a disaster movie plot.”

NYT reporter Brad Plumer was also skeptical the world was really ready to “stop” global warming in 1989, asking the obvious question, “how would we convince China to forego coal?”

Rich’s article follows a cast of characters, including former Friends of the Earth lobbyist Rafe Pomerance and former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who worked to sound the alarm on catastrophic global warming and convince world leaders to cut greenhouse gas emissions — and, yes, former Vice President Al Gore is in there too.

Hansen is remembered for his 1988 congressional testimony where he told lawmakers “greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

His testimony made waves in the media, despite being contradicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change two years later.

The narrative crescendos in 1989 when Rich claims the world was poised to sign a global agreement to stop global warming — but didn’t. Rich suggested human nature was to blame for failing to stop global warming.

Former New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin noted a major presumption of the article is “exploded” in the first few paragraphs.

The presumption is in this line: “It is true that *much of the damage that might have been avoided* is now inevitable.” Nowhere does the piece demonstrate that what is cast as a pivotal moment in 1989 was in fact pivotal

Many environmental activists and journalists were quick to attack Rich’s article for not laying blame at the feet of the fossil fuel industry for waging a misinformation campaign against climate science.

Rich mentions the theory but says fossil fuel companies didn’t start campaigning against climate policies in earnest until after 1989. Environmentalists disagreed.

Other activists took to social media to caution supporters not to lose hope in mitigating global warming, arguing that action can still be taken today to avert catastrophe.

Of course, none of them mentioned that many of the dire predictions about global warming made during this time have not come true, including Hansen’s own projections of temperature increases.

Two recent analyses found that observed temperature increases most closely followed Hansen’s lowest and “least likely” scenario for warming.

This scenario also assumed carbon dioxide emissions flatlined after the year 2000, which didn’t actually happen.

SOURCE 





Time to Drain Australia's Energy Swamp

By Viv Forbes

The Australian electricity market has become a stinking swamp covered with a tangled net of treaties, laws, rules, obligations, prohibitions, targets, taxes and subsidies. The swamp conceals the rubble of demolished coal generators; another plant destined for destruction (Liddell) is gradually sinking in the green ooze.

The way out of the energy swamp is to retrace the way we got in.

First, get to the root of the problem – UN Climate Alarmism. Disown the Paris and Kyoto Treaties and dump all the obligations, costs, hobbles and distortions they have created. Stop their pointless war on carbon energy. Carbon dioxide does not control climate but it does support all life on earth.

Abolish green energy targets and renewable energy certificates – they belong in museums beside the WW2 ration cards.

Then de-fund and boycott the rotten core of climate alarmism - the UNIPCC. Shun their never-ending climate conferences and cease funding all of their green tentacles. Cancel the tax exempt status of political activists posing as honest scientists.

Then unravel the electricity regulations mess. Stop politicians from banning or promoting their energy favourites – speculators should be free to build wind, solar, geothermal, wave, coal, gas, nuclear or pig-poo power generators free of all special taxes, subsidies and market mandates. But no electricity distributer, retailer or consumer should be forced to accept unreliable or expensive electricity.

Then abolish all guaranteed returns on inflated capital for those who gold-plate power lines and poles, or expect big returns on under-used connections to remote wind farms or other green energy toys. Consumers should not be saddled with these hidden green taxes.

All electricity producers and retailers should face competitive market prices, get no special subsidies and obey the same tax laws. But they should be encouraged to enter into long term contracts to supply base-load or peak power at agreed prices. Such contracts could underpin construction of new reliable generation capacity.

De-centralise decision making. Politicians should stop backing losers. Test energy theories properly by letting green states go deep green on intermittent energy, while others place their bets on long-term contracts from new HELE (High Energy Low Emissions) running on solid reliable black “fossil sunshine”. Allow isolated communities to try sealed transportable nuclear power packs.

The choice for our crippled electricity industry is stark – swift surgical reform and practical innovation; or let the lights go out as our once-cheap-and-reliable grid drowns in the smelly regulatory swamp.

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.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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