Brainless Beto: Only 10 Years Left to Act on Climate Change

Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas), a 2020 presidential candidate, predicted that the U.S. has 10 years left to act on climate change.

"At this point there can be no shadow of a doubt that our own excesses and emissions and inaction politically and as a country and a democracy, where each of us comprise the government, have led to the warming we've seen so far -- one degree Celsius just since 1980," O'Rourke said during the "We the People Membership Forum" in Washington on Monday. "I direct you to Valencia from Florida, whose question I just listened to backstage -- how does this First World country create second-class citizens who face Third World conditions?"

To support his position on climate change, O'Rourke referred to the "58 inches of rain that fell from the sky" in Houston. He called on lawmakers to start "confronting climate change before it is too late, within the 10 years we have left to us to act."

O'Rourke said he would join the Paris climate agreement that President Trump withdrew from in 2017.

"As ambitious as those are, [they] are not ambitious enough," O'Rourke said of the agreement.

O'Rourke promised that he would sign an executive order on the first day of his presidency requiring all cabinet secretaries to hold town hall meetings with the public each month "to listen to you and be accountable to you."

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Plastic Bag Bans Won't Help the Environment, But They'll Cause More Foodborne Illnesses

New York lawmakers have followed California’s lead and decided to ban grocery stores from giving customers plastic bags. They hope shoppers will use their own cloth bags instead. This ban on plastic bags will harm shoppers in multiple ways.

As Daniel Frank sarcastically notes, “Reusable tote bags” can “cause food poisoning but at least they’re worse for the environment than plastic bags.” He cites Jon Passantino of BuzzFeed News, who observes, “Those cotton tote bags that are so trendy right now have to be used *131 times* before it has a smaller climate impact than a plastic bag used only once.” Yet, there are progressives who want to ban plastic grocery bags in favor of reusable cloth bags.

Plastic bags are less than one percent of all litter. Moreover, alternatives like cloth and paper bags are in many cases worse for the environment than plastic bags, and far worse for public health. That was illustrated by a 2011 legal settlement between plastic bag makers and an importer of reusable bags, ChicoBag. The plastic bag makers sued ChicoBag for its use of false claims about the recycling rate and environmental impacts of plastic grocery bags in its promotional materials. (Those false claims are also the basis for municipal bans and taxes on plastic bags.)

Plastic bags are “less than 0.5% of the litter stream,” according to the head of the National Black Chamber of Commerce.

Under that settlement, ChicoBag was required to discontinue its use of its counterfeit EPA website and make corrections to its deceptive marketing claims, which had included sharing falsified government documents with schoolchildren. It was also required to disclose to consumers on its website that reusable bags, in fact, need to be washed.

Reusable bags “are a breeding ground for bacteria and pose public health risks — food poisoning, skin infections such as bacterial boils, allergic reactions, triggering of asthma attacks, and ear infections,” noted a 2009 report.  Harmful bacteria like E. coli, salmonella, and fecal coliform thrive in reusable bags unless they are washed after each use, according to an August 2011 peer-reviewed study, “Assessment of the Potential for Cross-contamination of Food Products by Reusable Shopping Bags.”

Among the inaccurate claims that ChicoBag could no longer make after the settlement is one that contrasted the environmental impact of plastic versus reusable bags. Contrary to ChicoBag’s previous claims, a study done for the U.K. Environmental Agency showed it would take 7.5 years of using the same cloth bag (393 uses, assuming one grocery trip per week) to make it a better option than a plastic bag reused three times. See “Life Cycle Assessment of Supermarket Carrier Bags,” Executive Summary, 2nd page.

As an earlier report on the subject noted (see p. 60):

[A]ny decision to ban traditional polyethylene plastic grocery bags in favor of bags made from alternative materials (compostable plastic or recycled paper) will be counterproductive and result in a significant increase in environmental impacts across a number of categories from global warming effects to the use of precious potable water resources. … [T]he standard polyethylene grocery bag has significantly lower environmental impacts than a 30% recycled content paper bag and a compostable plastic bag.

As the UK Environmental Agency pointed out in July 2011, a

cotton bag has a greater [harmful environmental] impact than the conventional [plastic] bag in seven of the nine impact categories even when used 173 times. … The impact was considerably larger in categories such as acidification and aquatic & terrestrial ecotoxicity due to the energy used to produce cotton yarn and the fertilisers used during the growth of the cotton (see p. 60).

Similarly,

Starch-polyester blend bags have a higher global warming potential and abiotic depletion than conventional polymer bags, due both to the increased weight of material in a bag and higher material production impacts (see Executive Summary).

As Environmental Protection noted in 2010:

Reusable grocery bags can serve as a breeding ground for dangerous food-borne bacteria and pose a serious risk to public health, according to a joint food safety research report issued by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University. The study — which randomly tested reusable grocery bags carried by shoppers in the Los Angeles area, San Francisco, and Tucson, Ariz. — also found consumers were almost completely unaware of the need to regularly wash their bags.

“Our findings suggest a serious threat to public health, especially from coliform bacteria including E. coli, which were detected in half the bags sampled,” said Charles Gerba, Ph.D., a University of Arizona environmental microbiology professor and co-author of the study. “Furthermore, consumers are alarmingly unaware of these risks and the critical need to sanitize their bags after every use.” The bacteria levels found in reusable bags were significant enough to cause a wide range of serious health problems and even lead to death — a particular danger for young children, who are especially vulnerable to food-borne illnesses, he said.

The study also found that awareness of potential risks was very low. A full 97 percent of those interviewed have never washed or bleached their reusable bags, said Gerba, who added that thorough washing kills nearly all bacteria that accumulate in reusable bags.

Plastic bags are “less than 0.5% of the litter stream,” according to the head of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. That low percentage is confirmed by EPA data. (See, e.g., EPA, Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2009 Facts and Figures, p. 53, showing that the entire category of plastic sacks, wraps, and bags—including trash bags as well as grocery bags—together account for only a little over one percent of all municipal solid waste, and only a small fraction of overall plastics.)

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California Snow Pack Now At 4th Highest Ever Recorded

California’s snowpack is officially 162% higher than average, the fourth-highest ever recorded, after state officials performed the annual measurement this week in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

“Department of Water Resources officials announced a measurement of 106.5 inches of snow at Phillips Station, good for a snow-water equivalent of 51 inches,” the Sacramento Bee reports. Phillips Station itself was actually at 200 percent of normal.

The California winter and early spring have been cold and wet, as the state — particularly in Northern California — has been hit by a series of “atmospheric rivers” carrying moisture from the Pacific. San Francisco endured one rain storm after another, and the mountains received record-breaking amounts of snow in short periods of time. Los Angeles enduredits coldest February in 60 years, when the temperature never reached 70 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time ever.

The deep snowpack is welcome news for Californians — especially for farmers, who suffered through the state’s record-breaking drought from 2012 to 2018. Much of the state’s water supply comes from the Sierra snowpack, which melts throughout the spring and summer. In addition, heavy snows have been a boon to the state’s ski resorts.

However, the huge snowpack also poses a challenge, especially the risk of flooding. State officials opened the new spillway this week at the Oroville Dam — the nation’s highest — to prevent flooding later in the spring as runoff begins to fill the lake.

Despite the heavy precipitation, state and local authorities continue to plan for the next drought. Whether through climate change or a reversion to the historic norm after the unusually wet 19th and 20th centuries, California is likely to be drier in future — and will almost certainly face greater demands on scarce water resources, regardless.

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New Report: Global Warming And ‘Extreme Weather’ Are Not Accelerating

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) is misleading the public by suggesting that global warming and its impacts are accelerating. In fact, since 2016 global average temperature has continued to decline.

That’s according to Norwegian Professor Ole Humlum whose annual review of the world’s climate is published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Last week, the WMO issued its own review of the climate, which insinuated that global warming was worsening.

However, Professor Humlum points out that the data tells a very different story:

“Reading the WMO report, you would think that global warming was getting worse. But in fact, it is carefully worded to give a false impression. The data are far more suggestive of an improvement than deterioration.”

And the lack of anything to be alarmed about is clear across a range of measures, says Professor Humlum:

“After the warm year of 2016, temperatures last year continued to fall back to levels of the so-called warming “pause” of 2000-2015. There is no sign of any acceleration in global temperature, hurricanes or sea-level rise. These empirical observations show no sign of acceleration whatsoever.”

Professor Humlum’s key findings:

In 2018, the average global surface temperature continued a gradual descent towards the level characterizing the years before the strong 2015–16 El Niño episode.

Since 2004, when the Argo floats came into operation, the global oceans above 1900m depth have on average warmed somewhat. The maximum warming (between the surface and 120 m depth) mainly affects oceans near the equator, where the incoming solar radiation is at a maximum. In contrast, net cooling has been pronounced for the North Atlantic since 2004.

Data from tide gauges all over the world suggest an average global sea-level rise of 1– 1.5 mm/year, while the satellite record suggests a rise of about 3.2 mm/year. The large difference between the two data sets still has no broadly accepted explanation.

The Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent has undergone important local and regional variations from year to year. The overall global tendency since 1972, however, is for overall stable snow extent.

Tropical storm and hurricane accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) values since 1970 have displayed large variations from year to year, but no overall trend towards either lower or higher activity. The same applies to the number of hurricane landfalls in the continental United States, for which the record begins in 1851.

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Another New Study Shows Early 21st-Century Global Warming Hiatus Was Real

A new study by Williams et al appearing in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that the global warming hiatus of the early 21st century was in fact real.

A number of scientists from the alarmist camp like to insist that there had never been such a hiatus. The latest paper contradicts that claim.

The new study states that many published analyses show that lightning activity is responsive to temperature on time scales ranging from the diurnal to the decadal and that the hiatus in global warming earlier this century can be seen in several global datasets.

Scientists found that the statistically flat behavior of the global lightning record from the NASA Lightning Imaging Sensor over the same decadal period is consistent with this hiatus in global warming.

What follows is the paper’s abstract:

"Multiple records of global temperature contain periods of decadal length with flat or declining temperature trend, often termed a ‘hiatus’. Towards assessing the physical reality of two such periods (1940–1972 and 1998–2014), lightning data are examined.

Lightning activity is of particular interest because on many different time scales it has been shown to be non-linearly dependent on temperature. During the earlier hiatus, declining trends in regional thunder days have been documented.

During the more recent hiatus, lightning observations from the Lightning Imaging Sensor in space show no trend in flash rate.

Surface-based, radiosonde-based and satellite-based estimates of global temperature have all been examined to support the veracity of the hiatus in global warming over the time interval of the satellite-based lightning record.

Future measurements are needed to capture the total global lightning activity on a continuous basis.”

So much for settled science.

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