Tuesday, January 01, 2019


MSNBC’s Chuck Todd Kept ‘Climate Deniers’ Off His Hour-Long Global Warming Special

They're dead-scared of contradiction.  They know they cannot handle it.  If you want balance, go to a gym

NBC’s “Meet the Press” devoted the full hour of its Sunday program to talk about climate change, and the show focused the bulk of its time discussing the matter with a who’s who of climate activists.

MSNBC host Chuck Todd kicked off the program with a promise to the audience: the show will avoid debating the science of climate change. Instead, the hour was dedicated to asking various well-known climate activists about how to inject talk of global warming into American politics.

“We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period,” Todd said at the top of the broadcast. “We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.”

Outgoing Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown was also on hand to discuss his solutions. He called rising global temperatures a serious threat, something akin to what Americans faced at the outset of WWII. He said the U.S. is not doing enough to address the problem.

“[N]ot even close, and not close in California, and we’re doing more than anybody else, and not close in America or the rest of the world,” said Brown, who crafted a position as one of President Donald Trump’s biggest opponents.

He added: “We’ve got to get off this idea, ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’ No, it’s the environment.”

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made similar comments, telling Todd he is still mulling a presidential bid in 2020.

“I will be out there demanding that anybody that’s running has a plan. And I want to hear the plan, and I want everybody to look at it and say whether it’s doable,” the billionaire philanthropist said. (RELATED: House Democrats Are Lining Up Behind What Could Be The Largest Expansion Of Government In Decades)

Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are wrestling with a new flock of activist lawmakers who are pushing the party further to the left on climate policies. One of the ideas coming from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is the Green New Deal.

Sanders, a self-avowed socialist, and Ocasio-Cortez want to move the U.S. to 100-percent green energy, federal job guarantees for workers forced out of their fossil fuel jobs, guaranteed minimum income and universal health care. Analysts warn the Green New Deal could come with a monster price tag.

Eliminating fossil fuels and transitioning to a 100-percent renewable electric grid could cost as much as $5.2 trillion over two decades, according to a 2010 study by the conservative Heritage Foundation. That’s about $218 billion to move the grid away from coal and natural gas.

Mainstream Democrats are hesitant, especially those who remember the party’s failed carbon tax experiment in 2010, which ultimately helped thrust them into a political wasteland after the GOP won both houses of Congress that year.

SOURCE 





Trees Found Under Glaciers Discredits CO2 Climate Theory

Between 60 and 40 thousand years ago, during the middle of the last glacial, atmospheric CO2 levels hovered around 200 ppm – half of today’s concentration.

Tree remains dated to this period have been discovered 600-700 meters atop the modern treeline in the Russian Altai mountains.

This suggests surface air temperatures were between 2°C and 3°C warmer than today during this glacial period.

Tree trunks dating to the Early Holocene (between 10.6 and 6.2 thousand years ago) have been found about 350 meters higher than the modern treeline edge.

This suggests summer temperatures were between 2°C and 2.5°C warmer than today during the Early Holocene when CO2 concentrations ranged between about 250 and 270 ppm.

None of this paleoclimate treeline or temperature evidence correlates with a CO2-driven climate.

“Samples of wood having an age of 10.6–6.2 cal ka BP were [the Early Holocene]found about 350 m higher than the present treeline. It seems that the summer temperature was 2.0–2.5 °C higher and annual precipitation was double that of the present day”

“Buried wood trunks by a glacier gave ages between 60 and 28 cal ka BP and were found 600–700 m higher than the present upper treeline. This evidences a distinctly elevated treeline during MIS 3a and c. With a correction for tectonics, we reconstructed the summer warming to have been between 2.1 and 3.0 °C [higher than today].”

SOURCE 






Arctic sea ice volume has GROWN over the past 12 years

Arctic sea ice has not been cooperating at all with the doomsday scenarios of the global warming alarmists. Some of them said it should have gone ice-free in late summer by now.

A recent chart shows that late summer Arctic sea ice volume has GROWN over the past 12 years, and not plummeted as the alarmists once warned:



Note how predictions made back in 2007 by "leading experts" were completely wrong, and sea ice volume instead has been rising modestly, thus totally surprising and shaming the doomsday prophets.

Yet today the media as a whole continue to lend credibility to these totally failed experts. Is it only natural that citizens are distrustful and regard much climate reporting as "fake news"?

In summary: the polar ice has been holding up well for more than 10 years. The earlier predictions are totally wrong. And in historical context, there is more ice today at the poles than at most times over the past 10,000 years.

SOURCE 





COP 24: Dangerous rules recently added to Paris Climate Accord

Buried in the 133 pages of gobbledygook agreed to at last week's UN climate summit are two very dangerous provisions. These greatly advance the green cause known as "loss and damage."

This is where the green goal is for the developed countries like America to pay for all of the damages supposedly due to climate change, especially in the developing countries. Given that pretty much all bad weather is now attributed to human caused climate change, the potential amount of wealth transfer is simply staggering. I explain this in my May article titled "Absurd "loss & damage" policy advances at UN's Bonn climate summit."

The new provisions added at the Katowice, Poland summit meeting do not yet call for this sort of compensation, but they lay the groundwork for it. This is because they allow the developing countries to build their fantasy case in detail. Liability lawyers are going to love this.

These are basically paperwork provisions, but as I said in an earlier article on the Katowice summit, paperwork has implications.

First off, there is to be an annual report of climate change actions and events. This report was originally intended to facilitate verification of each country's claimed climate change efforts under the Paris Agreement. Each country has what is called "Nationally Determined Contributions" for addressing climate change and the idea is that their progress needs to be monitored. Thus the UN-speak for this yearly report is called the "Transparency Framework" because it is designed for watching what countries are doing.

The sorts of things originally intended to be reported are CO2 emissions, emission reductions, adaptation projects, as well as financial transactions. The latter are a big deal, especially funding by developed countries to developing countries.

However, it is now the case that developing countries can also annually report loss and damage from climate change. They will certainly do this and they have every incentive to make the numbers as big as possible. I can imagine countries competing to see who has been hit hardest. They are, after all, hoping to get paid and the bigger the hit the more they make.

Countries can even include projected future loss and damage. (Damage refers to things that can be fixed, albeit perhaps at great cost. Loss includes things like lives and crops.) These projections open the door to wild speculation using computer modeling, along the lines of the recent reports from the IPCC and the National Climate Assessment.

The second provision has to do with what is called the "Global Stocktake." This is a recurring five year assessment, based on the cumulative Transparency Framework reports. Here we can expect to see truly huge numbers for global losses and damages. (It remains to be seen if preposterous claims can be challenged within the UN process.)

All of the above is artfully designed to put pressure for compensation on America and the other developed countries. These numbers can also support claims for compensation in the Courts. There is even a proposal to have a big tax on fossil fuels, the proceeds going to pay for losses and damages.

Here is how proponents of this monster tax put it in a recently released 32 page report titled "The Climate Damages Tax: A guide to what it is and how it works." They ominously say this:

"A day of reckoning is coming. There is a price for heating up the planet and to date the fossil fuel industry have fled the table without paying the bill. When climate change has brought devastation, poorest countries and communities have been left to pay. The Climate Damages Tax (CDT) proposal set out in this paper can help rectify this situation by making the fossil fuel industry pay for their damage."

It is mind boggling that the developed countries allowed this to happen in Katowice. Under UN rules any country can veto a position, so the developed countries should have piled on the vetoes. Note that the U.S. is still at the table; in fact they successfully challenged a motion to "welcome" the latest IPCC scaremongering report, on the grounds that they do not accept it as accurate.

But this nice gesture is as nothing compared to allowing developing countries to make unsupported claims for trillions of dollars in loss and damage, which is just where we are now going under these dangerous new Paris Accord provisions. Then the question of compensation will hit the fan for sure.

SOURCE 





Let's Follow The Climate Money!

Paul Driessen

The climate crisis industry claims 24/7/365 that fossil fuel emissions are causing unprecedented temperature, climate and weather changes that pose existential threats to human civilization and our planet. The only solution, Climate Crisis, Inc. insists, is to eliminate the oil, coal and natural gas that provide 80% of the energy that makes US and global, cpossible.

Failing that, CCI demands steadily increasing taxes on carbon-based fuels and carbon dioxide emissions.

However, as France's Yellow Vest protests and the latest climate confab in Poland demonstrated, the world does not accept CCI's assertions. Countries worldwide are expanding their fossil fuel use, and families are refusing to reduce their living standards or their aspirations for better lives.

Moreover, climate computer model forecasts are completely out of touch with real-world observations. There is no evidence to support claims that the slight temperature, climate and weather changes we've experienced are dangerous, unprecedented or caused by humans, instead of by the powerful solar, oceanic and other natural forces that have driven similar or far more serious changes throughout history.

More importantly, the CCI "solutions" would cause unprecedented disruption of modern industrialized societies; permanent poverty and disease in poor countries; and serious ecological damage worldwide.

Nothing that is required to harness breezes and sunshine to power civilization is clean, green, renewable, climate-friendly or sustainable. Tens of billions of tons of rock would have to be removed, to extract billions of tons of ores, to create millions of tons of metals, concrete and other materials, to manufacture millions of wind turbines and solar panels, and install them on millions of acres of wildlife habitats - to generate expensive, intermittent energy that would still be grossly insufficient for humanity's needs. Every step in this process requires fossil fuels - and some of the mining involves child labor.

How do CCI alarmists respond to these points? They don't. They refuse to engage in or even permit civil discussion. They rant that anyone "who denies climate change science" is on the fossil fuel industry payroll, thus has a blatant conflict of interest and thus no credibility, and therefore should be ignored. 

"Rebuttals" to my recent "We are still IN" article cited Greenpeace and DeSmogBlog as their "reliable sources" and claimed: I'm "associated with" several "right-wing think tanks that are skeptical of man-made climate change." One of them "received $582,000 from ExxonMobil" over a 14-year period, another got "$5,716,325 from Koch foundations" over 18 years, and the Koch Brothers gave "at least $100,343,292 to 84 groups denying climate change science" in 20 years, my detractors claimed.

These multi-year contributions work out to $41,571 annually; $317,574 per year; and $59,728 per organization per year, respectively - to pay salaries and overhead at think tanks that are engaged in multiple social, tax, education, medical and other issues . not just energy and climate change.

But let's assume for a moment that money - especially funding from anyone with a "special interest" in the outcome of a research project - renders a researcher incapable of analyzing facts fairly and honestly.

Then apply those zero-tolerance, zero-credibility Greenpeace-DeSmogBlog-CCI standards to those very same climate alarmists and their allies - who are determined to shut down debate and impose their wind, solar and biofuel policies on the world. Where do they get their money, and how much do they get?

Billionaire and potential presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg gave the Sierra Club $110 million in a six-year period to fund its campaign against coal-generated electricity. Chesapeake Energy gave the Club $26 million in three years to promote natural gas and attack coal. Ten wealthy liberal foundations gave another $51 million over eight years to the Club and other environmentalist groups to battle coal.

Over a 12-year period, the Environmental Protection Agency gave its 15 Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee members $180.8 million in grants - and in exchange received quick rubberstamp approvals of various air quality rules. It paid the American Lung Association $20 million to support its regulations.

During the Obama years, the EPA, Interior Department and other federal agencies paid environmental pressure groups tens of millions in collusive, secretive sue-and-settle lawsuit payoffs on dozens of issues.

Then we get to the really big money: taxpayer funds that government agencies hand out to scientists, computer modelers and pressure groups - to promote global warming and climate change alarmism.

As Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore noted recently, citing government and other reports: 

* Federal funding for climate change research, technology, international assistance, and adaptation has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014, with an additional $26.1 billion for climate change programs and activities provided by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

* The Feds spent an estimated $150 billion on climate change and green energy subsidies during President Obama's first term.

* That didn't include the 30% tax credit/subsidies for wind and solar power: $8 billion to $10 billion a year - plus billions more from state programs that require utilities to buy expensive "green" energy.

* Worldwide, according to the "progressive" Climate Policy Initiative, climate change "investment" in 2013 totaled $359 billion - but this "falls far short" of the $5 trillion per year that's actually needed.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change echoes those greedy demands. It says the world must spend $2.4 trillion per year for the next 17 years to subsidize the transition to renewable energy.

Bear in mind that $1.5 trillion per yearwas already being spent in 2014 on Climate Crisis, Inc. research, consulting, carbon trading and renewable projects, according to the Climate Change Business Journal. With 6-8% annual growth, we're easily looking at a $2-trillion-per-year climate industry by now.

The US Government Accountability Office puts United States taxpayer funding alone at $2.1 billion per year for climate change "science" . $9.0 billion a year for technology R&D . and $1.8 billion a year for international assistance. Total US Government spending on climate change totaled $179 billion (!) from 1993 through 2017, according to the GAO. That's $20 million per day!

At the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit, 29 far-left foundations pledged to give $4 billion over five years to their new Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming campaign. Sea Change Foundation co-founder Nat Simons made it clear that this "is only a down payment"!

And I get pilloried for working with organizations that received $41,571 to $59,728 per year from fossil fuel interests . questioning claims that fossil fuels are causing climate chaos . and raising inconvenient facts about wind, solar and biofuel replacements for coal, oil and natural gas.

Just as outrageous, tens of millions of dollars are squandered every year to finance "studies" that supposedly show "surging greenhouse gases" and "manmade climate change" are creating dangerous hybrid puffer fish, causing salmon to lose their ability to detect danger, making sharks right-handed and unable to hunt, increasing the number of animal bites, and causing US cities to be overrun by rats.

Let's apply the Greenpeace-DeSmogBlog-Climate Crisis, Inc. standard to them. Their massive multi-billion-dollar conflicts of interest clearly make them incapable of analyzing climate and energy matters fairly and honestly - and disqualify them from participating in any further discussions about America's and the world's energy and economic future.

At the very least, they and the institutions that have been getting rich and powerful off the catastrophic manmade global warming and climate hustle should be cut off from any future federal funding.

Via email

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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 or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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