Caught in lie: Data destroys claim about Bangladeshi climate migrants

Objective crop data are humiliating climate alarmists once again. In an article appearing at the top of Google News searches for “global warming” this past weekend, Al Jazeera made the claim that global warming is punishing Bangladeshi crop production, creating climate refugees. A review of objective crop data, however, shows Bangladesh is enjoying a dramatic long-term increase in crop production, resulting in record food availability, as the Earth continues its modest warming.

In an article describing global warming as creating “climate apartheid,” Al Jazeera claims global warming is hurting the impoverished nation of Bangladesh especially hard. “In particular, the low-lying country’s southwestern areas struggle disproportionally with the adverse effects of climate change on sectors such as agriculture and health,” asserts Al Jazeera.

We at CFACT decided to review crop data from Bangladesh to see if the claim is true. Not surprisingly, the claim is a ridiculous lie.

Economic data company CEIC publishes on its website United Nations Food and Agriculture data on Bangladeshi crop production. The data are striking. According to UN data current through 2017, the past five years were the five years with the highest Bangladeshi crop output in history. Bangladeshi crop output is up 20 percent since 2007, up 60 percent since 1998, and has approximately doubled since 1995.

Climate alarmists are fond of blaming every problem in the world on global warming. As Al Jazeera’s Bangladeshi crop assertion shows, however, rarely if ever does objective evidence support the alarmist lies.

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New York’s climate change solution: Harm regular people for no noticeable benefit

Last week, the New York City Council approved a resolution declaring a climate emergency that it hopes will mobilize efforts to forestall the devastation of purported global warming from greenhouse gas emissions.  While entirely symbolic and not even needing presidential hopeful Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature, the council said its action could make America’s largest city a global leader “by organizing a transition to renewable energy and climate emergency mobilization effort.”

In support of the call for an emergency declaration, the document cited increasing wildfires, droughts, extreme weather, and possible extinction of up to one million species over the next several decades.  To prevent such harm, the resolution draws much from the Green New Deal and the Paris Climate Accord, including net zero greenhouse gas emissions, a 100% renewable energy goal, and “climate justice” (whatever that is).  The document ends with a call for an “immediate emergency mobilization to restore a safe climate.”

If these terrible catastrophes were occurring and we could prevent them, then serious measures would certainly be necessary.  However, widely accepted data — from sources other than extremists such as the World Wildlife Fund — reveal inconvenient facts quite dissimilar to the claims of the council.

Contrary to its statements, extreme weather-related deaths have been in long-term and significant decline, falling by 98% over the last 80-plus years.  Heat-related deaths are outnumbered by those due to cold by as much as 20:1, meaning that warming would save lives.  The United States Drought Monitor shows that the area in drought in this country is at its historic low since data collection began nearly twenty years ago.  The allegation of an extinction of one million species would require 25,000 to 30,000 extinctions per year, yet, according to the IUCN Red List, the extinctions numbers have been in significant decline since the early 1900s and have averaged only two per year since 1970.

The overarching goal of the resolution is to lower the Earth’s temperature by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide.  In order to achieve the proposed reductions, energy costs would necessarily be increased significantly, either through a cap-and-trade system or a direct tax on emissions.  Either of these methods would raise costs across the board for all citizens and companies.  If the citizens of New York City, or, for that matter, the citizens across the Empire State were to be subjected to the economically crippling increases in costs associated with the energy transformation proposed, should we not know just how much of an effect a reduction in emissions would have on temperature?

The MAGICC simulator (Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change) was developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research under funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  The model estimates how much temperature rise would be averted globally by various reductions of CO2.  According to the model, a 100% reduction in CO2 emissions for the whole of the state of New York (using climate sensitivity of 2.0) would decrease warming by 0.002 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 and by 0.006 degrees F by 2100.

This extremely small — and immeasurable — effect should be an important consideration in the discussions of whether or not to impose the significant burdens of future carbon taxing schemes by the leaders of any city, any state, or our nation.  How many lost jobs is a reduction in temperature measured in thousandths of a degree worth?

The justifications for this resolution and its proposed climate change “solutions” are based on flawed assumptions, the costs and regulations are economically crippling, and the result is a temperature reduction so low that it is indistinguishable from zero.  In short, New York City’s resolution is a plan that would infringe on the freedoms of its citizens and make them significantly poorer for virtually no advancement of the council’s intentions.

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The Battle of New Orleans: Climate-Change Edition

Joe Bastardi     

On Tuesday, Weatherbell.com started covering the threat of flooding in New Orleans, and it’s a very real threat. But a storm like Barry, assuming it makes landfall as far west as we think it will, would not contain the same kind of threat if not for some preexisting conditions that occurred in the winter and spring.

Back on April 23, I warned about how tropical cyclones would be used as ammo in the weaponization of the weather.   That forecast is already coming true with today’s threat.

First of all, we identified this threat last week. I’ve been very noisy about it because it is emblematic of the kind of season we have predicted, with scattershot in-close development and likely below-average activity in the main development regions of the Atlantic. So there’s nothing magical or mysterious about this storm developing from a feature that originated well away from the deep tropics.

In fact, I talked about this on Neil Cavuto’s show last week. A notorious example was Alicia in 1983, which developed south of Louisiana from a feature that originated from the north. The storm went on to hit as a Category 3 hurricane southwest of Galveston, TX. So the idea that this week’s storm should intensify quite rapidly before reaching the coast has been discussed since last week.

But what makes this storm so different and so threatening to New Orleans is how high the Mississippi River is. The reason it is so high is because of the late, cold winter in the Great Plains. Prodigious snowfall resulted in enhanced snowmelt, which was followed by above-normal rainfall.

What is particularly galling is that around the turn of the century, there was hysteria about snow being a thing of the past. Yet snow is increasing in the Northern Hemisphere! Then, back in 2013, after the hot summers of 2010-12 were blamed on climate change (even though the heat and drought were similar to 1952-1954 and could not hold a candle to the 1930s), there were predictions that a new dust bowl would develop due to climate change. I publicly challenged that notion in 2013 on several outlets. Here we are several years later and the question is: How can you blame “man-made climate change” when the result was exactly opposite of what was being predicted?

The answer is quite simple: You can’t. You simply rely on the fact that people do not remember what was said and that every weather event is now used in a way to push a political agenda. It’s called weaponizing the weather, and I address it in one of the longest chapters of my book, The Climate Chronicles. It’s as if someone read the book and decided, Hey, let’s double down on it.

More than likely in the coming days, if this storm ramps up and gets close to New Orleans, you will be hearing the climate-change missive.

In fact, this is a new field that’s easier to forecast in than the actual weather. Forecast beforehand what Climate Ambulance Chasers are going to say and before they even know a storm is going to form. I take to Twitter to do that at times.

Maybe we can even have Climate Ambulance Chaser watches and warnings, given the unwarranted hysteria and distortion to which this agenda is prone.

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China and Israel are “greening” deserts to create positive climate change

Israel and China have been hard at work at this for at least six decades, and both countries have generated impressive results. More recently, other countries have joined the effort to reclaim desert lands through afforestation and other means – but despite the progress, there has been little mention of reversing desertification as a means of climate alteration.

Greening the Kubuqi in Inner Mongolia

Let’s start with China. Sixty-four years ago (in 1955) China began efforts to reclaim desert land and make it suitable for farming. An early answer was the “straw checkerboard,” discovered accidentally when a worker stuck straw into the sand. Even today Chinese workers are reclaiming vast areas by this method.

But a newer, perhaps even more promising technology has been developed by Chinese soil scientists working in the Kubuqi Desert in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The Chinese People’s Daily (August 10, 2018) reported that, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the government, as well as the joint efforts of local people and enterprises, the Kubuqi desert has experienced a historical change in beating desertification through afforestation.

The article adds that the success of Kubuqi should be attributed to the unique concept to increasing incomes for local residents through afforestation. Over the past several decades, about 6,000 square kilometers of sand have been tamed, creating ecological benefits worth more than 500 billion yuan, providing jobs for one million people, and lifting over 100,000 people out of poverty.

People who have worked to reverse desertification believe that the economic benefit created by the afforestation in the area is comparable to the ecological results. The market-oriented method is vital to the success of the region’s desertification control. Without markets, the enthusiasm of the enterprises could not be fully motivated; without industry, sand control could not be sustained.

Greening the Negev in Israel

Israel, a much smaller country with a much smaller (Negev) desert, nonetheless tackled greening its desert shortly after being granted its independence in 1948. The Israeli company Netafim invented modern drip irrigation technology in the 1960s. This allowed the precious and scarce water resources of the desert to be used at extreme limits to grow crops.

A 1987 article in The Christian Science Monitor written by Jonathan Auerbach reported that, “Mirage-like, acres of colorful vegetables ripen in the hot sun. But more remarkable is that the crops are genetically engineered and irrigated with super-salty, `brackish’ water from large aquifers beneath the Negev.”

Auerbach called Israel’s dramatic greening of the Negev with brackish water “a technological and biological breakthrough” that “portends a revolution in the management of land and water resources in desert environments.” By 1987, the previously “uninhabitable” Negev was already home to 445,000 Jews and 55,000 Bedouins, and more than 250 thriving agricultural settlements.

Even in 1987, Israel was using solar technology in conjunction with desertification reversal efforts. A solar-powered computer from Motorola Israel, Ltd., automatically “fertigated” the fields. A local farmer explained that, “It’s like farming by eye dropper: A supply of fertilizer and brackish water is dripped into individual plant roots through thin plastic tubing – an anti-evaporation method developed by Israel in the 1960s and now used throughout the world.”

Indeed, 32 years ago, quietly bridging the political barriers, 10,000 Israeli brackish water specialists were training agronomists and villages in 54 countries around the world — many without diplomatic ties to Israel. Israeli farmers were helping Navajo families in Arizona’s Painted Desert stretch their scant water resources. While the Negev contained 300 billion cubic meters of super-salty brackish water, even larger deposits were estimated to lie under the great Saharan tracts of Africa and in the third world, where drought and hunger are prevalent and food supplies inadequate.

Today, the Negev is smaller than it was 50 years ago. It remains a major contributor to Israeli agriculture but also a proving ground for newer technologies aimed at reclaiming even more of the desert for human use. While in the 1950s Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion predicted the Negev would one day be home to 7 million Jews, the numbers have increased from half a million in the 1987 to 700,000 today.

Greening the Sahara

As Andy Coghlan reported in Earth in October 2006, African farmers have been reclaiming the desert, turning the barren wastelands of the Sahel region on the Sahara’s southern edge into green, productive farmland.

In Niger, tree planting has led to the re-greening of as much as 3 million hectares of land, enabling some 250,000 hectares to be farmed again. The land had become barren in the 1970s and early 1980s through poor management and felling of trees for firewood. Beginning in the mid-1980s, farmers in parts of Niger began protecting them instead of chopping them down. The change came after the government turned trees from a liability to an asset by ceding their ownership to the farmers who planted and nurtured them.

Dutch scientist Chris Reij at the time had hopes that the “Oasis” initiative to reclaim deserts, launched at the From Desert to Oasis symposium in Niger that year, would spread to Mali, Senegal, and Burkina Faso. And it has, to one degree or another.

Meanwhile, a Dutch company, Groasis B.V., argues that “once, most deserts were green, and the real cause of their existence and status now, is humanity itself.” The company states that, in many countries desert reforestation efforts occur with expensive and capital-intensive methods that often require subsidies to be stable. Groasis agrees with the Chinese and Israelis that markets are the real key to successful desert greening. Instead, they argue, “the problem should solve itself by developing a principle where an investor, NGO, or government can have a good return on investment by reforesting the deserts. ROI – not subsidy – is the key.

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Amazing:  Australias's leading Greenie is AGAINST a wind farm

He's now in his mid-70s.  Is the usual turn to conservatism with age getting him too?

Former Greens leader and veteran activist Bob Brown is campaigning to stop a $1.6 billion wind farm development in Tasmania because it will spoil the view and kill birds.

The proposed Robbins Island wind farm in Tasmania’s northwest will be one of the world’s biggest, with up to 200 towers measuring 270m high from ground to blade tip.

If it goes ahead, electricity from the Robbins Island project will be sent to the mainland via a new ­undersea cable to help make Tasmania a “battery for the nation”.

But in a letter to local media and on his foundation’s website, Dr Brown has slammed the project, which he said had echoes of earlier attempts to build skyscrapers in Hobart which were stopped by protests.

Despite the criticisms levelled at former prime minister Tony Abbott and treasurer Joe Hockey for describing wind turbines as “ugly”, Dr Brown said the Robbins Island plan was, visually, a step too far. “Mariners will see this hairbrush of tall towers from 50km out to sea and elevated landlubbers will see it, like it or not, from greater distances on land,” Dr Brown said. “Its eye-catchiness will divert from every coastal scene on the western Bass Strait coastline.”

Dr Brown, who fought against Queensland’s Adani coal mine, said the world needed renewable energy to replace fossil fuels, and fast, but the Robbins Island wind farm “is an aileron too far”.

He said the public had not been properly informed of the private deals, or public impacts or cost-benefit analyses (economic, social, cultural and environmental) of what would be one of the biggest wind farm projects on Earth. He said details of the arrangements between the Hammond family, which farmed wagyu beef and owned the land, and developer UPC Renewables were not known. “Tasmanians have a right to know much more about the Robbins Island development,” Dr Brown said. “It is a huge resource extraction venture which will be lighting up no Tasmanian homes.”

Dr Brown’s opposition is shared by some locals, including the Nietta Action Group, which is fighting both the wind farm and a transmission line.

Members of the Nietta Action Group told The Australian last month that natural values would be destroyed if the planned transmission line across Leven Canyon went ahead. Others have raised concerns about whether a walled causeway to the island, as part of the project, would interrupt tidal flows, damaging the vital sandflat ecosystems.

However, Anton Rohner, chief executive of UPC Renewables, and the Hammond wagyu beef farming family, last month told The Australian expert modelling suggested several bridge sections in the causeway would avoid ­adverse impacts.

“We are cattle people; we love the environment,” said Alex Hammond. “Part of our brand, which sells our beef around the world, is that we are in the cleanest, greenest area in the world.

“So we certainly don’t want to do anything to impact on that.” Dr Brown sparked anger in central Queensland during the election campaign when he led a convoy of anti-coal activists to coalmining towns in protest against the Adani coalmine. The intervention was credited by some pundits with driving voters away from Labor and to the ­Coalition in the May 18 election.

In his letter on the wind farm, Dr Brown wrote: “Besides the impact on the coastal scenery, wind turbines kill birds. Wedge-tailed eagle and white-bellied sea eagles nest and hunt on the island. Swift parrots and orange-bellied parrots traverse the island on their migrations.”

He listed the multiple species of international migratory, endangered and critically endangered shorebirds that used the wetlands for six months of the year. They included Australian fairy tern, fork-tailed swift, little tern, white-throated needletail, ruddy turnstone, sharp-tailed sandpiper, sanderling, red knot, curlew sandpiper, red-necked stint, great knot, double-banded plover, greater sand plover, lesser sand plover, Latham’s snipe, bar-tailed godwit, eastern curlew, whimbrel, golden plover, grey plover, grey-tailed tattler, common greenshank, terek sandpiper, hooded plover.

“For which of these species will the wind farm be the thousandth cut?” Dr Brown asked.

He said the transmission lines for the wind farm were planned to cut through wild and scenic Tasmania, including the northeast Tarkine forests, to link up with a new export cable beneath Bass Strait. “In the name of private ­enterprise, why not UPC build its own cable under the Strait from Robbins Island straight to wherever,” Dr Brown said.

UPC said the project was ­located close to the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) proposed second interconnector between Tasmania and Victoria.

“Once built, it will complement the Prime Minister’s recently announced strategy for Tasmanian wind and hydro systems to act as southeast Australia’s renewable energy battery,” the company said. The project faces local and federal regulatory hurdles and unrest about the citing of both the Robbins Island wind farms and the transmission line. Dr Brown said Tasmania already had more than enough electricity to meet its own needs and UPC was a multinational corporation with projects in China, The Philippines and Indonesia.

“Beyond the indisputable environmental losses, what is the guaranteed money this giant venture is returning to the state of Tasmania as against UPC’s foreign stakeholders?’’ he asked.

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