Thursday, June 06, 2019



'Thirty years from complete catastrophe': Admiral claims human civilisation will end as we know it in 2050

Prophecies of doom are as old as the hills, and they are always wrong. And theres no science in this one.  Warmer oceans would mean more rain -- with vast beneficial effects.  But they say a warmer earth will be in drought -- "desertification".  They haven't got a blind clue.  Though you may be consoled to hear that their "report" was endorsed by former Australian defence chief Admiral Chris Barrie.  It takes an admiral ....

And a couple of degrees of warming would do nothing.  I was born and bred in the tropics -- where temperatures were often up to ten degrees warmer than the global average.  And our civilization was unaffected. Though we did drink a lot of cold beer


There is a high likelihood that human civilisation as we know it will come to an end by 2050.

That's according to a policy paper, Existential Climate-related security risk, which predicts more than half of world's population will face lethal heat conditions beyond the threshold of human survivability.

It says desertification could be severe in southern Africa, the southern Mediterranean, west Asia, the Middle East, inland Australia and across the south-western United States.

The report said a number of ecosystems, including coral reef, the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic, will collapse by 2050.

'Even for 2C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated and in high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end,' it said.

These scenarios were presented by David Spratt, the research director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne, and Ian Dunlop, former chairman of the Australian Coal Association and chair of the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading.

They said the social consequences of climate change range from 'increased religious fervor to outright chaos.'

'The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities,' they warned.

'Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible.' 

They have presented scenarios for three periods from 2020 to 2030, 2030 to 2050 and 2050. According to their report, by 2030 policy-makers will fail to act on evidence and prevent growing greenhouse gas emissions.

'While sea levels have risen 0.5 metres by 2050, the increase may be 2 to 3 metres by 2100, and it is understood from historical analogues that seas may eventually rise by more than 25 metres,' the report said.

'Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability.'

SOURCE 





Biden's Greenie scam

If Joe Biden had been inclined to take a middle-of-the-road approach toward climate change, he’s abandoned it, judging by the proposal he unveiled Tuesday — an aggressive $1.7-trillion, 10-year plan to combat warming that goes considerably further than the environmental agenda of the Obama White House.

Climate change got relatively little attention in the 2016 campaign. By contrast, this year, there is almost a race by Democratic candidates to outdo one another in environmental ambition.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee argues that climate action must take precedence over everything else and has styled himself as the climate candidate. He calls for the U.S. to have an economy running 100% on renewable energy by 2035. Beto O’Rourke, trying to regain some forward motion in a seemingly stalled campaign, turned hard to climate action and swore off any fossil-fuel related campaign money after activists took note of all the oil industry workers who have donated to him.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders echoed the sentiment of many in the party at last weekend’s California Democratic Party convention when he declared that “we have got to make it clear that when the future of the planet is at stake, there is no ‘middle ground.’” The remark was a shot at Biden after a campaign aide to the former vice president suggested to Reuters last month that a middle ground on climate was exactly what Biden sought.

No one in the Biden campaign is saying that now.

In joining the scrum of prominent 2020 hopefuls who have made far-reaching climate action a central focus of their campaign, Biden, the front-runner for the party’s nomination, proposed cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to zero by 2050, a goal set out in the Green New Deal, the policy framework championed by the most progressive Democrats.

He proposed getting to that goal with an agenda that includes far-reaching and potentially economically disruptive “enforcement mechanisms” on industry, as well as trade penalties for other countries that cheat on climate commitments. And he proposed raising corporate taxes to help pay for the program.

Biden’s plan also nods to one of his signature personal and political causes — Amtrak. It includes a call to “spark the second great railroad revolution” by reinvesting in California’s high-speed rail project, doubling the speed of existing fast trains in the Northeast, and ultimately expanding the network of such rail nationwide.

“We should become the innovative place in the world for the change that has to take place if we are going to survive,” Biden said at a campaign stop in Berlin, N.H.

The ambition and scope of his blueprint rival those of candidates to his left, including a plan presented Tuesday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who proposes to spend $2 trillion over 10 years to speed the transition to a clean-energy economy and trigger a “green manufacturing boom.”

She would pay for the plan with a previously unveiled tax on corporate profits over $100 million. She embraces a 2050 zero-emissions goal globally but says projected U.S. emissions would have to be cut to zero by 2030 to meet that goal.

“I’m betting on American science,” Warren said at a campaign stop in Detroit. “I’m betting on American ingenuity. I’m betting on American workers to get us to a point where we can fight back against climate change and save this planet.”

The flood of plans reflects the urgency with which Democratic voters now consider an issue that long has been an afterthought in presidential elections.

President Trump’s abandonment of the Paris agreement on climate change and his dismantling of Obama-era climate protections — coupled with stepped-up warnings from scientists worldwide that time to address warming is fast running out — has galvanized the Democratic Party around climate. More than 90% of Democrats support the Green New Deal, according to a poll released last month by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Six in 10 voters overall are now worried about global warming.

Most of the proposals the 2020 hopefuls have unveiled would reinstate the aggressive fuel mileage standards that Trump scrapped over the fierce objections and legal threats of California, reorient federal agencies toward climate action, and restore strict limits on methane pollution abandoned by Trump.

“Everyone is tripping over each other to be greener than the next guy,” said David Victor, a professor of international relations at UC San Diego and contributor to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Sunrise Movement, an advocacy group pressuring 2020 hopefuls to back the Green New Deal, declared the Biden plan “a huge win,” even as it joined other progressive groups in vowing to push the former vice president to go further.

The Biden plan still includes some signature centrist components, such as embracing nuclear energy as one way of weaning the economy off oil, coal and other fossil fuels. It also calls for investment in “carbon sequestration” — technology that sucks greenhouse gases from the air and repurposes or buries them — an approach many environmentalists warn will slow the transition away from fossil fuels.

The inclusion of those elements concerned Niklas Hohne, an author of studies for the U.N. panel and co-founder of NewClimate Institute, a German think tank. But, like Sunrise, he said the Biden plan would take the U.S. far down the field toward meeting the global climate commitments Trump disavowed.

“Joe Biden’s climate plan is definitely ambitious,” he said. “The corner piece of achieving net zero emissions no later than 2050 is an ambitious goal, in particular if implemented through milestones with an enforcement mechanism.” Hohne says such mechanisms have proven key in countries that are succeeding in making serious progress toward the climate goals agreed to in Paris.

Biden’s plan calls for an enforcement mechanism to be passed by Congress and enacted by 2025. It would be based on the principle that “polluters must bear the full cost of the carbon pollution they are emitting,” according to the campaign.

“Our economy must achieve ambitious reductions in emissions economy-wide instead of having just a few sectors carry the burden of change,” the Biden plan says.

The plan leaves open the possibility that the goals could be enforced by using a carbon tax, which many economists see as the most efficient way to transform the economy from one based heavily on fossil fuels to one powered by renewable sources.

“The plan nowhere explicitly says carbon tax, cap and trade, carbon pricing — the things economists like myself would say are absolutely essential to achieving these reductions,” said Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at Harvard University. “It sounds like that is what he is referring to, but it has become too politically dangerous for them to say it.”

Biden’s more progressive rivals also avoid such language in their plans.

Even so, the Biden proposal, like the others, would almost certainly be met with a hostile reception in a Senate that has a strong chance of remaining under GOP control after the 2020 elections.

That has led some to argue that many of the climate goals set by the candidates could be achieved by toughening the existing regulatory system without the politically debilitating fight over imposing a broad new tax.

It is not just Congress that could prove a tough hurdle in implementing any of the plans. The U.S. would also need to nudge the rest of the world along, and reclaiming America’s place as a leader in climate action could prove extremely difficult after Trump abandoned that role.

Even as Biden vowed to leverage his deep experience in foreign affairs to reestablish the alliances, experts warned the toolbox available to him or any Democratic president would be limited.

“Our credibility on this problem has eroded because of the flakiness of the White House,” said UC San Diego’s Victor. “How do we get China to participate with us now? None of these plans really say.”

SOURCE 





Economists Have Been “Useful Idiots” for the Green Socialists

In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used[1] the term “useful idiot” to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn’t realize that they were being exploited in such fashion. It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies. The radical environmentalists were quite happy to embrace the economic concepts of “Pigovian negative externalities” and a carbon tax in the past, but now that it is impossible for economic science to endorse their desired agenda, the activists have discarded the entire field as hopelessly out of touch. Economists who still support a carbon tax and other climate “mitigation policies” should be aware of the bigger picture.

Using the UN’s Own Document to Defeat the Climate Change Agenda
I have been making this case for years. For example, back in 2014 I used the latest (and still most recent) UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report to show that the then-popular climate change target of 2 degrees Celsius of warming could not be justified by the research summarized in the report. In other words, I used the UN’s own report to show that the popular climate change “cures” would be worse than the disease.

Yet even though they had spent years berating the critics of government action as “climate deniers” who rejected the “consensus science,” in this case—once they realized that the economic models of climate change wouldn’t support aggressive intervention—the environmental activists all of a sudden began pointing out all the things that the UN-endorsed studies left out. Rather than summarizing the cutting edge knowledge on climate science and mitigation policies, the IPCC document turned into a bunch of misleading nonsense that would give ammunition to deniers.

Nobel Laureate Inconveniently Blows Up the Paris Agreement
Last fall, we had another demonstration of the chasm between the actual research and the media/political treatment: William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on climate change, on the same weekend that the UN released a “special report” advising governments on how to try to limit global warming to as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius.

There was just one little problem: Nordhaus’ Nobel-winning work clearly showed that the UN’s goal was insane. According to his model, it would literally be better for governments around the world to do nothing about climate change, rather than enact policies limiting warming to 1.5°C. Rather than aiming for a 1.5°C target, Nordhaus’ most recent model runs indicated that the “optimal” amount of warming to allow was closer to 3.5°C. (To an outsider this might not seem like a huge discrepancy, but it is absolutely gigantic in the context of the climate change policy debate. Many activists would confidently predict that even 2.5°C of warming would spell disaster for our grandchildren.)

Ah, but I got the best confirmation of my quixotic position just last week, when the Guardian ran an editorial with this subtitle (my highlighting):



Does everybody see that? The people at the Guardian already know what the policy answers are, without needing any help from the economists.

Conclusion

My economist colleagues who continue to urge for a “carbon tax swap deal” in order to get rid of “onerous top-down regulations” and enact a simple “price on carbon” are fooling themselves. Whether it’s in a ballot initiative in Washington State—literally designed by an environmental economist, or in the wonky columns of Vox’s climate expert, in the political calculus of Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, or in the FAQ on the Green New Deal itself, the environmental activists in US politics are making it quite clear that they will not settle for such half-measures.

Market-friendly economists chiming in on the American political scene should stop being useful idiots for the green socialists. Whatever the possible merits of a theoretical carbon tax package—in which a regressive hike in energy prices is matched dollar-for-dollar with corporate income tax cuts, and decades of special-interest favoring regulations are thrown out the window in the zeal for efficiency—this is all a moot point. If market-friendly economists succeed in getting their readers to hold their noses and support a carbon tax, they will all learn quite quickly that the deal has been altered.

[1] The use of the term “useful idiots” has been attributed to Lenin, but apparently that link is disputed.

SOURCE 





Climate change scare stories reach the point of psychological TERRORISM… while scientists blame the fear on the “climate crisis”

The corporate media cartels have become hubs of hatred and “journo-terrorism” that targets the psyche of the masses. The quack science hoax of so-called “climate change” is used to terrorize the public into believing that their planet will somehow be destroyed by carbon dioxide — the very molecule that has been rapidly re-greening the Earth over the past four decades, according to NASA.

Now, a new round of “science” has been studying the mental stress of the victims of this psychological terrorism pushed by the dishonest media, and they’ve reached an even more bizarre conclusion. Scientists now claim that climate change is causing “mental anguish” among humans. Seriously.

Of course, the real source of the mental anguish is the lies and panic propaganda of the corporate media and the pathetic scientific establishment which has figured out that if you want more government grant money, you have to conduct “research” that identifies some new crisis to be blamed on climate change. In fact, the very phrase “climate change” isn’t scary enough yet to achieve the desired goal of mass mental terrorism, so media outlets around the world are now ordering their obedient writers to start using the phrase “climate crisis.”

And if you don’t believe there’s a “climate crisis,” then you will of course be banned from all online platforms, just like Apple recently banned Natural News, claiming our content failed to mirror the “scientific consensus” on topics like climate science.

And there you have it: All news outlets, researchers and individual voices are now required to panic over the climate, or you will be banned and silenced. This is what so-called “climate change” has come to: a dangerous CULT of quackery and left-wing lunacy. Like all cults, those who are deeply embedded in the cult demand that everyone else join their cult or be forever silenced.

The very same people who believe in a “climate crisis,” by the way, are the kind of people who cut off their own penis and scrotum using a scalpel in an effort to become a “nullo” — a gender-neutral, obedient “progressive” who exhibits no reproductive organs whatsoever. This, we are told, is the ultimately expression of tolerance and progress.

Or maybe, perhaps, all these lunatics are just f##king insane, and they spend their lives terrorizing each other over make-believe fear scenarios in order to achieve some illusion of self-importance as they desperately try to navigate a world that makes no sense to them because the rational portions of their brains have been short-circuited with fear, hatred and social engineering propaganda. The zombie apocalypse is here, and the zombies are the libtards who have proven themselves to be utterly incapable of independent thought.

If only they would all cut off their own balls, we could have this entire surge of lunacy self-eliminated in just one generation of “progressivism,” via the laws of natural selection.

SOURCE 





Facts vs. fearmongering in Australia

Forget GetUp, It’s Corporate Climate Bullies We Should Fear

If there was a gold medal for corporate climate change hypocrisy, the American company Ben & Jerry’s Holdings Inc. would be hard to beat.

Ben & Jerry’s is a wholly owned subsidiary of the giant foreign multinational corporation Unilever, and during the recent Federal election they ran a marketing campaign: “Let’s make sure Climate is the #1 election issue in Australia”.

Their advertising campaign was full of the typical climate lies and deceptions, with this foreign multinational effectively calling for Australians to vote for Labor and The Greens.

However, the first thing that anyone that really wants to ‘vote for the climate’ should do is to stop buying Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

Firstly, dairy cows are one of Australia’s largest single sources of Co2 emissions. In fact, Australia’s herd of dairy cows (nine million tonnes) emit more Co2 than the Liddell coal-fired power station (around 7.5 million tonnes) does.

Therefore, you are part of the climate cult that believes we can stop bad weather, it should be just as important to you that dairy products (including ice-cream) come off the menu, as it is to close down coal-fired power stations.

Secondly, the manufacturing, distribution and retailing of ice-cream products are highly energy intensive, especially since frozen Ben & Jerry’s ice cream must be kept at temperatures of -10°F (-23°C) throughout the distribution chain.

Thirdly, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is manufactured in the USA and it has to be shipped in special refrigerated transport all the way to Australia (thank you fossil fuels).

Advertising gurus at foreign multinational corporations like Ben & Jerry’s are playing with fire.

With their deceptive, misleading and breathtakingly hypocritical advertising campaign, they are holding hands with anti-capitalists that would seek to destroy them at first opportunity.

They are effectively feeding the crocodile, hoping it will eat them last.

But in the meantime, what a better way for the sanctimonious to virtue signal on the climate (and those opposed to hypocrisy and foreign interference in Australian election campaigns) – give up buying imported foreign-made Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream.

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 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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