Monday, October 14, 2019



On Cape Cod, climate change is terrifyingly real

The illogicality of Warmists knows no bounds.  They admit that some climate episode they want to exploit is local and then talk as if it was a global effect.  They say that in the Cape Cod climate "warming is faster than nearly any in the world".  So it is local data about a local effect and has no evidentiary value about global anything, including global warming. So the attributions below are mere opinion.

So what is warming Cape Cod?  Nobody knows but local eddies in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation -- known to you as the Gulf Stream -- would be a likely area of enquiry


The Cape Cod we love is at risk. It is perched on a stretch of ocean warming faster than nearly any in the world. And as much as we might wish it away, as hard as we try to ignore it, the effects of climate change here are already visible, tangible, measurable, disturbing.

Perfect summers have grown hotter and muggier. Storms arrive violently, and more often.

People here like to say that the only thing constant about the Cape is change, but what human-caused climate change has already wrought here is not the same old uncertainty. It is loss.

And so we have criss-crossed the Cape in search of what is slipping away.

The Cape is fundamentally a peaceful place. For generations, we have talked about joy and family and the restorative power of open ocean and unspoiled sand.

But talk to the people who live and work here, who study emerging threats to the place they’ve always known, and you will hear them use different words: Higher ground. Breach. Retreat.

SOURCE





Stop Scaring the Kids. The Planet Is Fine

The kids are out of their minds. They're out in the streets, blocking traffic and dancing around like maniacs because they think the sky is falling. This is entirely the fault of the adults who refuse to tell them the truth about the weather. For decades now the young have been bombarded with climate apocalypse tales of destruction. Meanwhile, not even the climate-change kooks can get their facts straight.

A few years ago NASA reported that Antarctic sea ice was at an all-time high. "Sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s." But this kind of news never changes the minds of the climate high priests. “The Antarctic sea ice is one of those areas where things have not gone entirely as expected. So it’s natural for scientists to ask, ‘OK, this isn’t what we expected, now how can we explain it?'" Of course, they can't explain it, because scientists don't know half of what they want everyone to think they know especially when it comes to our planet.

"There hasn’t been one explanation yet that I’d say has become a consensus, where people say, ‘We’ve nailed it, this is why it’s happening,’” said Claire Parkinson, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Cente. “Our models are improving, but they’re far from perfect. One by one, scientists are figuring out that particular variables are more important than we thought years ago, and one by one those variables are getting incorporated into the models.”

A few years later,  warm water is "attacking" Antarctic ice and the answer, again, is climate change. No matter the question, the answer is "global warming and/or climate change." Record snowstorms? Climate change. Record heatwave? Global warming. It's the same song and dance every single time we have any weather event. They can't accurately predict the weather for the weekend but expect us to believe that they know what the planet will be like in a decade from now.

Scientists who push this fear-mongering garbage have a lot of responsibility for the hysteria they are creating among young people.  The major problem with the climate activists, who are clogging streets with "performance art" currently, is that they simply haven't lived long enough to see the truth of things. Their brains are not fully developed and they have very little life experience that didn't involve Sponge Bob Square Pants and study hall.

When I was their age, my teachers and popular magazines told my generation that we would be living under sheets of ice by now. They literally said this, every day, for most of the '80s. I don't remember when global warming really kicked in, but I think I was out of high school by then and not susceptible to the brainwashing. The ice age thing did freak me out, although I remember my dad saying something like "hippie hogwash" when I brought it up. And so it was. Because here we are, almost in the 2020s, when the ice age was supposed to be in full swing, and everything is pretty much exactly the way it was in the '80s. Time is what is needed for perspective.

Some of the older kids in this movement should remember that Al Gore predicted the earth would be on fire by 2006. They were in high school watching An Inconvenient Truth because their teachers forced it on them. (And I know this because at the time, one of my friends was one of those teachers and I used to give him all sorts of hell for bringing that propaganda into the classroom.) The world has not exploded into tidal waves and mass extinction events like Al Gore said it would. Those kids who were in high school back then should notice this.

When Alexandria Ocassional-Cortex pipes in with more dire predictions and tells us that we only have ten years left, everyone should be laughing, not rolling around in the streets making fools of themselves. What is wrong with them? Can't they pick up a history book or at least search Google for the last apocalypse prediction that didn't come true? I'm starting to think the youth of today really has been ruined by fluoride and video games. Why don't their brains work? Instead of kicking and screaming and demanding politicians do something about the weather that no one can control, why don't they come up with ideas to make the world a better place?

SOURCE





The madness of Extinction Rebellion

This is an upper-middle-class death cult and we should ridicule it out of existence

Yesterday, in London, I witnessed an eerie, chilling sight: I saw a death cult holding a ceremony in public. The men and women gathered outside King’s Cross station and formed a circle. They swayed and chanted. They preached about End Times. ‘What will you do when the world gets hot, what, what?’, they intoned, conjuring up images of the hellfire they believe will shortly consume mankind. They sang hymns to their god – science. ‘We’ve got all the science / All that we need / To change the world / Hallelujah’, they sang, rocking side to side as they did so.

They demanded repentance. ‘Buy less, fly less, fry less’, said one placard. Catholics only demand the non-consumption of meat on Fridays, as an act of penance to mark the day of Christ’s death. This new religion demands an end to meat-consumption entirely, as penance for mankind’s sins of growth and progress.

And like all death cultists, they handed out leaflets that contained within them ‘THE TRUTH’. The leaflets foretell floods and fire: ‘We are in trouble. Sea levels are rising… Africa and the Amazon are on fire.’ The only word that was missing was locusts. They can’t be far behind these other ghastly visitations to sinful mankind.

And if you question their TRUTH? Then, like those heretics who were hauled before The Inquisition 500 years ago, you will be denounced as a denier. A denier of their revelations, a denier of their visions. ‘Denial is not a policy’, their placards decreed. Spotting me filming their spooky, apocalyptic ceremony, one of the attendees waved that placard in my face. A warning from the cult to a corrupted outsider.

This was, of course, Extinction Rebellion. Let us no longer beat around the bush about these people. This is an upper-middle-class death cult.

This is a millenarian movement that might speak of science, but which is driven by sheer irrationalism. By fear, moral exhaustion and misanthropy. This is the deflated, self-loathing bourgeoisie coming together to project their own psycho-social hang-ups on to society at large. They must be criticised and ridiculed out of existence.

Yesterday’s gathering, like so many other Extinction Rebellion gatherings, was middle-aged and middle-class. The commuters heading in and out of King’s Cross looked upon them with bemusement. ‘Oh, it’s those Extinction freaks’, I heard one young man say. It had the feel of Hampstead and the Home Counties descending on a busy London spot to proselytise the cult of eco-alarmism to the brainwashed, commuting plebs.

It was a gathering to mark Extinction Rebellion’s week of disruption. The group is asking people in London and other cities around the world to ‘take two weeks off work’ and join the revolt against the ‘climate and ecological crisis’. You can tell who they’re trying to appeal to. Working-class people and the poor of New Delhi, Mumbai and Cape Town – some of the cities in which Extinction Rebellion will be causing disruption – of course cannot afford to take two weeks off work. But then, these protests aren’t for those people. In fact, they’re against those people.

Extinction Rebellion is a reactionary, regressive and elitist movement whose aim is to impose the most disturbing form of austerity imaginable on people across the world. One of the great ironies of ‘progressive’ politics today is that people of a leftist persuasion will say it is borderline fascism if the Tory government closes down a library in Wolverhampton, but then they will cheer this eco-death cult when it demands a virtual halt to economic growth with not a single thought for the devastating, immiserating and outright lethal impact such a course of action would have on the working and struggling peoples of the world.

Extinction Rebellion says mankind is doomed if we do not cut carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2025. That’s six years’ time. Think about it: they want us to halt a vast array of human activity that produces carbon. All that Australian digging for coal; all those Chinese factories employing millions of people and producing billions of things used by people around the world; all those jobs in the UK in the fossil-fuel industries; all those coal-fired power stations; all that flying; all that driving… cut it all back, rein it in, stop it. And the people who rely on these things for their work and their food and their warmth? Screw them. They’re only humans. Horrible, destructive, stupid humans.

Progressive movements, as the name suggests, used to be about pursuing progress, pushing mankind forwards, creating a better, wealthier world for all. Extinction Rebellion wants the precise opposite. It wants to propel us backwards, to the Stone Age. It wants to reverse the most important moment in human history – the Industrial Revolution. It wants to undo that revolution’s liberation of mankind from the brutishness and ignorance of life on the land and recreate that old, unforgiving world in which we all ‘ate locally’, never travelled, danced around maypoles for fun, and died of cholera when we were 38.

The sheer backwardness of Extinction Rebellion was captured when two of its members appeared on Sky News yesterday morning. They complained, hysterically, about modernity. One of them bemoaned all the electricity that is used in a city like London. So the very lighting up and warming of cities, the electricity that powers homes and workplaces and transport systems and life-support machines, is offensive to these hair-shirted, self-flagellating loathers of arrogant humankind. ‘Switch it all off’, is their alarmingly immoral cry.

What is most astonishing about the Extinction Rebellion phenomenon is what an easy ride these people get in the media and from political types. They are treated as wise and radical defenders of reason and the future. Please. These people are a menace to good sense, rationality, truth and progress. Their predictions of hellfire if we don’t cut carbon emissions by 2025 are pure bunkum. They lie and spread fear and disrupt hard-working people’s lives. If you see this cult promoting its deathly propaganda on the streets of your city this week, give them a piece of your mind.

SOURCE






Dyson Becomes Latest Sign That Electric-Car Bubble Is Bursting

Dyson Ltd.’s sudden decision to scrap its $2.5 billion electric-vehicle ambitions is the latest reality check creeping into the once soaring EV industry.

The famed maker of vacuum cleaners and hair dryers couldn’t find a way of making the project commercially viable, billionaire James Dyson said in a letter to staff Thursday. The announcement came about two years after the company first disclosed its plans to jump into car manufacturing.

Dyson represents one of the most high-profile players to pull out of a sector that’s attracted hundreds of start-ups in recent years seeking to become the next Tesla Inc. But there are mounting signs that the bubble is bursting as China scales back handouts in the sector and competition heats up. Sanford C. Bernstein estimates that global EV sales fell for the first time ever in July and dropped by a record 23% in August.

“Tesla’s future remains uncertain. Almost all the EV start-ups trying to follow look challenged,” Bernstein analysts, including Max Warburton and Robin Zhu, said in a report that cited the Dyson decision as a worrisome development in the industry. “Most of these start-ups will likely fold. The truth is barriers to entry in autos remain high. Making cars is hard. The move to EVs will be expensive.”

Take the case of China’s NIO Inc., one of the most prominent electric-car makers in a country that makes about half of the world’s EVs. Last month it reported a wider-than-expected quarterly loss, leading the stock to tumble to a record low and prompting analysts to openly question the company’s viability. The shares jumped on Tuesday after NIO reported third-quarter deliveries exceeded the company’s forecast, but the stock has since erased all those gains.

Elsewhere in China, Lifan Industry Group Co. and Zotye Automobile Co. have had to issue statements denying speculation that they’re planning to file for bankruptcy, though the former conceded it’s under liquidity pressure.

The competition is also getting tougher. Besides Tesla, traditional automakers such as General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG are throwing massive resources into electrification. VW has vowed a $33 billion push to bring battery-powered autos to the masses. Apple Inc. has had an automotive project since about 2016, although it is said to have scaled back its ambitions.

There are growing concerns that the ample supply of cheap funding for new-age carmakers is about to dry up, according to Bernstein.

As to Dyson, the company said it plans to continue its 2.5 billion-pound ($3.1 billion) investment program into new technology, and will concentrate on manufacturing solid-state batteries and other technologies including machine learning and robotics.

“Singapore will play an important role in Dyson’s growth plans,” Tan Kong Hwee, assistant managing director at Singapore’s Economic Development Board, said in an emailed statement Friday. Despite Dyson’s decision, Singapore “remains interested in advanced manufacturing activities, including for EVs,” he said.

Experts had questioned the company’s costly plans to build an electric car plant in Singapore, where average salaries are among the highest in the world. Ford Motor Co. closed its factory in the city-state about 40 years ago, effectively ending car production on the island.

“If everybody else is building a plant in China at a fraction of the cost in terms of labor, it didn’t make a lot of sense for anybody to build that size of a manufacturing facility over there,” said Steve Man, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence in Hong Kong. “I hope Singapore wasn’t expecting much from this.”

Still, Singapore has much riding on Dyson in its efforts to attract start-ups and advanced technology companies. Dyson became one of the biggest global industry names to ever relocate there.

SOURCE





Australia and US looking to challenge China's hold on the rare earths market

Because China could undercut any supplier at any time, a government guaranteed price may be needed to get the go-ahead for new mines

Australia and the US have been in discussions to form a rare earths joint action plan to open up what has become a concentrated market that's dominated by China.

Rare earths are metals and alloys that are used in many modern-day devices such as rechargeable batteries, mobile phones and catalytic converters.

Australian Resources Minister Matt Canavan says there is no doubt Chinese producers are seeking to protect their market position "as dominant suppliers do from time to time".

He told Sky News on Sunday that China has also in the past couple of years made various statements that would potentially restrict the supply of rare earths.

Australia has 14 of the 35 rare earths deemed critical to the US.  "We are very lucky in Australia to have a great mineral industry, so we will do our best to establish these markets," Senator Canavan said. "These are very important to the modern economy."

However, the concentration of these markets do make it very difficult for the private sector to develop rare earths and there are concerns commercial operators could struggle to maintain their position over time.

"The concentration of all these markets could cause a risk to the security and affordability of the the supply of these critical minerals," he said.

The government has supported projects in the past through the likes of the Export Finance Insurance Corporation, providing concessional finance, he said.

The senator said he has also spoken to Australia's counterparts in Japan and Korea on the issue. "I think there is a good case for worldwide co-operation here to diversify the supply of these minerals," he said.

SOURCE 

***************************************

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

*****************************************

No comments: