Climategate: Ten years later

Climate alarmists are still promoting junk science, fossil fuel bans and wealth redistribution

Dr Kelvin Kemm

This month marks the tenth anniversary of “Climategate” – the release of thousands of emails to and from climate scientists who had been (and still are) collaborating and colluding to create a manmade climate crisis that exists in their minds and computer models, but not in the real world. The scandal should have ended climate catastrophism. Instead, it was studiously buried by politicians, scientists, activists and crony capitalists, who will rake in trillions of dollars from the exaggerations and fakery, while exempting themselves from the damage they are inflicting on everyday families.

Few people know the Inconvenient Facts about the supposed manmade climate and extreme weather “crisis.” For example, since 1998, average global temperatures have risen by a mere few hundredths of a degree. (For a time, they even declined slightly.) Yet all we hear is baseless rhetoric about manmade carbon dioxide causing global warming and climate changes that pose existential threats to humanity, wildlife and planet. Based on this, we are told we must stop using fossil fuels to power economic growth and better living standards. This is bad news for Africa and the world.

We keep hearing that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels cause rising global temperatures. But satellite data show no such thing. In fact, computer model predictions for 2019 are almost a half degree Celsius (0.9 degrees F) above actual satellite measurements. Even worse, anytime a scientist raises questions about the alleged crisis, he or she is denounced as a “climate change denier.”

A major source of data supporting the human CO2- induced warming proposition came from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Then on the morning of 17 November 2009 a Pandora’s box of embarrassing CRU information exploded onto the world scene. A computer hacker penetrated the university’s computer system and took 61 Megs of material that showed the CRU had been manipulating scientific information to make global warming appear to be the fault of mankind and industrial CO2. Among many other scandals, the shocking leaked emails showed then-CRU-director Prof. Phil Jones boasting of using statistical “tricks” to remove evidence of observed declines in global temperatures.

In another email, he advocated deleting data rather than providing it to scientists who did not share his view and might criticize his analyses. Non-alarmist scientists had to invoke British freedom of information laws to get the information. Jones was later suspended, and former British Chancellor Lord Lawson called for a Government enquiry into the embarrassing exposé.

The affair became known as “Climategate,” and a group of American University students even posted a YouTube song, “Hide the Decline,” mocking the CRU and climate modeler Dr. Michael Mann, whose use of the phrase “hide the decline” in temperatures had been found in the hacked emails.

So what is the truth? If one considers the composition of the atmosphere and equates it to the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the extra plant-fertilizing CO2 added to the atmosphere since California became the 31st state of the United States in 1850 is less than the thickness of tiles under the Tower.

Can this tiny increase really explain any observed global warming since the Little Ice Age ended, and the modern industrial era began? Since California became a state, the measured global rise in atmospheric temperature has been less than 10C. But most of this increase occurred prior to 1940, and average planetary temperatures fell from around 1943 until about 1978, leading to a global cooling scare. Temperatures rose slightly until 1998, then mostly remained stable, even as carbon dioxide levels continued to rise. Rising CO2 levels and temperature variations do not correlate very well at all. 

Moreover, during the well-documented Medieval Warm Period from about 950 to 1350, warmer global temperatures allowed Viking farmers to raise crops and tend cattle in Greenland. The equally well documented 500-year Little Ice Age starved and froze the Vikings out of Greenland, before reaching its coldest point, the Maunder Minimum, 1645-1715. That’s when England’s River Thames regularly froze over, Norwegian farmers demanded compensation for lands buried by advancing glaciers, and priests performed exorcism rituals to keep alpine glaciers away from villages. Paintings from the era show crowds of people ice skating and driving horse-drawn carriages on the Thames.

Industry and automobile emissions obviously played no role in either the MWP or the LIA.

These dramatic events should ring warning bells for any competent, honest scientist. If the Medieval Warm Period occurred without industrial CO2 driving it, why should industrial CO2 be causing any observed warming today? Europe’s great plague wiped out nearly a quarter of its population during the Little Ice Age. The warm period brought prosperity and record crops, while cold years brought misery, famine and death.

Ten years before Climategate, Dr. Mann released a computer-generated graph purporting to show global temperatures over the previous 1500 years. His graph mysteriously made the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and Maunder extreme cold years disappear – and planetary temperatures spike suddenly the last couple decades of twentieth century. The graph had the shape of a hockey stick, was published worldwide and became a centerpiece for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Many scientists were highly suspicious of the hockey stick claims. Two of them, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, completely discredited Mann’s computer program and revisionist history. Of course, that did not stop former US vice president Al Gore from using the discredited graph in his doom and gloom climate change movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

The hacked CRU emails also showed exchanges between Mann and Jones, in which they discussed how to intimidate editors who wanted to publish scientific views contrary to theirs, to suppress any contradictory studies. In one email, Jones expressed his desire to get rid of the “troublesome editor” of the Climate Research journal for daring to publish differing views. The editor got sacked.

When University of Colorado climate skeptic Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. asked the CRU for its original temperature readings, he was told the data had been (conveniently) lost. Lost!?! Do professionals lose something as valuable as original data? Many suspected they just didn’t want anyone to expose their clever manipulations and fabrications.

But if industrial carbon dioxide did not cause recent global warming, what did? A Danish research group, led by Prof. Henrik Svensmark, has found a very credible match between levels of sunspot activity (giant magnetic storms) on our Sun and global temperatures over the last fifteen hundred years. This all-natural mechanism actually fits the evidence! How terribly inconvenient for alarmists.

Cosmic rays from deep space constantly impinge on the Earth’s upper atmosphere and produce clouds, much like high-flying jets leave white contrails behind their engines. More clouds can trap heat, but they also cause global cooling because not as much sunlight strikes the Earth. More sunspots mean a stronger magnetic shield, therefore fewer cosmic rays reaching Earth, thus less cloud cover and more global warming. The Sun is currently in a near-record period of low sunspot activity.

All sorts of interest groups are suppressing this information. Maybe worse, when Climategate broke, “climate justice” campaigner for Friends of the Earth Emma Brindal said bluntly: “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.” Not protecting Earth from manmade CO2 emissions or natural and manmade climate change – but redistributing wealth and resources, according to formulas that self-appointed ruling elites decide is “socially just.”

Climate campaigners also oppose “excessive” air travel for business or pleasure, 4x4 vehicles as “unnecessary luxuries,” and modern homes for Africans. Some even say Africans must continue living in mud huts and avoid the use of electricity and modern farming technologies. Minor US actor Ed Begley has said “Africans should have solar power where they need it most: on their huts.” They, Al Gore, Phil Jones and Mike Mann are exempted from these restrictions, of course.

Real social justice and human rights mean everyone has access to abundant, reliable, affordable energy, especially universally important electricity. Not from expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels. From fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants.

We in the developing world will no longer let climate truth be suppressed. We will not allow loud, radical activists to put the brakes on African economic development, jobs, and improved health and living standards, in the name of advancing their anti-human, wealth redistribution agendas.

Via email.  Dr. Kelvin Kemm is a nuclear physicist from South  Africa





Billboad in London Encourages White People to Sterilize Themselves

More modern Malthusians

A billboard has appeared in London encouraging white people to sterilize themselves to solve overpopulation.

The sign, which was put up on Holloway Road, says “Imagine a city less crowded… do your part–get sterilised! Yay!”

The advertisement betrays a noticeable lack of ‘diversity’ as it only features caricatures of white people and no people of color.

Promotion of sterilization appears to be having an impact in some western countries where native birth rates are already dropping.

The number of Swedish men seeking voluntary vasectomies has risen by 70 per cent – from from 1,430 men in 2013 to 2,470 in 2017. In cities like Stockholm, the number of men sterilizing themselves has doubled over the last five years.

This has contributed to Swedes having a 1.78 birth rate, well below the replacement rate of 2.2 children per woman. This compares to just over 2 children for women from migrant backgrounds.

SOURCE 





The Shameless Hypocrisy Of Cities Suing For Climate Change ‘Damages’

North and South American natives once spoke of the mythical El Dorado, a sacred city made entirely of gold. History records that conquistadors embarked on expeditions throughout the Americas in pursuit of El Dorado and legendary riches. Ultimately their quests yielded nothing but misery and loss.

A modern-day parallel exists among several municipal governments and Rhode Island, which have set out on an equally unrealistic quest for a modern-day “jackpot justice” – a scheme to reap billions from several energy companies.

Using an already discredited “public nuisance” legal claim, Rhode Island and several cities have filed lawsuits that blame all of Earth’s climate change on a few profitable energy companies. The suits allege that, by producing oil, these energy companies have contributed to climate change, which, they argue, may cause damage to their communities in the future. Their cases, incidentally, fail to mention the large amounts of fossil fuels used by these same cities for public transportation, municipal airports, city buildings, and public improvement projects.

Litigants point to a July ruling in which an activist Rhode Island judge overturned a previous decision to move Rhode Island’s climate change case to federal court. Having watched federal courts dismiss many of these claims outright, the plaintiffs believe they have a better chance of success in lower, state courts. Baltimore was also successful in blocking a motion to move its lawsuit to federal court.

Still, climate litigants would be wise to keep the champagne firmly corked as these recent rulings in Rhode Island and Baltimore will likely be overturned. In North Dakota earlier this year, a similar nuisance case against Purdue Pharma was dismissed by a judge who found the plaintiffs failed to meet the required burden of proof. Moreover, the courts reviewing the Oklahoma case are likely to take a more skeptical view of the nuisance tactic, which has generally fared poorly on appeal. For example, a nuisance suit against lead paint manufacturers initially succeeded, only to fail on appeal in 2009, ironically before the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

A major driver of legal precedent denying the use of nuisance ordinances comes from an Obama-era Supreme Court ruling. In the 8-0 American Electric Power v. Connecticut decision in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations cannot be sued for greenhouse gas emissions because the Clean Air Act specifically tasks the Environmental Protection Agency and Congress with the proper regulatory authority. Put another way, only the executive and legislative branches – not the judicial branch – may regulate and impose climate change policy. That precedent was properly cited last year when New York City’s climate lawsuit was bounced out of court. Also last year, a federal judge dismissed Oakland and San Francisco’s lawsuit for being outside the court’s authority.

In addition to the utter lack of legal substantiation, these lawsuits reveal how these municipalities are speaking out of both sides of their mouths. In one setting they downplay risks of climate change and in other settings they pretend the risks have never been higher.

Consider San Francisco’s 2017 municipal bond offering which reassuringly told potential investors, “The City is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur, when they may occur, and if any such events occur, whether they will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the City and the local economy.” Yet in its multi-billion-dollar climate lawsuit, the city went full-on Chicken Little, warning, “Global warming-induced sea level rise is already causing flooding of low-lying areas of San Francisco.”

The example isn’t isolated. Marin County, California’s lawsuit alarmingly asserted that there’s a 99-percent risk of an epic climate-change-related flood by 2050. But a municipal bond offering to potential investors failed to warn of any potential climate change dangers claimed within its lawsuit. San Mateo County’s prospectus advising bond investors that it’s “unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur” didn’t stop it from forecasting a 93-percent chance cataclysmic flood by 2050 in its lawsuit against oil companies. The examples go on.

Aside from the shameless hypocrisy of mayors wooing potential investors while claiming pending climate disaster in court, the motivation behind these lawsuits is clear. Many cities filing lawsuits against energy companies are financial train wrecks, seeking billions to offset their mismanagement. Huge legal awards – enough to make their fiscal troubles vanish – have a powerful allure. The prospect of jackpot justice has fogged their judgment just as surely as the conquistadors who vainly searched for El Dorado. 

If anything, the mayors of Oakland, New York, San Diego, and others are seeking pots of Fool’s Gold. These greedy politicians should stop abusing the legal system, wasting taxpayer dollars, and put a halt to their fantasy gold-digging.

SOURCE 





The Academic Rants of Eco-Fascism

Sumantra Maitra

“Lets [sic] start dismantling the ramblings of this colonial, supremacist piece of [expletive censored, for civility].”

I woke up on Monday morning to find an angry email from a certain Luke Barnesmoore, the director of the University of British Columbia Urban Studies Lab, in Canada, who has penned an essay about my sickly “A.D. Worldview(s)”. “I’m quite confident you’ll find all of your very worst nightmares in my writings, and I would love to discourse with you about the demons that haunt your sleep.” He provided links to several of his essays, including a piece called “Destroying the Abrahamic Edifice of Western Civilization: The Pagan Barbarians of the North are Coming,” raging, “We must destroy patriarchy, capitalism, western legal systems and all other manifestations of the sickly, hierarchical ontology of dualism that arises from the poison contained within the fruits of the tree of good and evil.” (I hope the Canadian taxpayers are aware that this is what they are funding as research!)

“Pagan Barbarians” is a “response” to my latest article in The Federalist, “Climate Worship Is Nothing More Than Rebranded Paganism.” I argued there that environmentalism is a neo-pagan, Gaia-worshipping cult exploited by cynical ideologues who wish to destroy the Christian-capitalist edifice of Western civilization. My brio caused a minor storm on Twitter, and prompted both snarky blogposts and serious theological debates.

Out of curiosity, I googled him to find exactly the mugshot of a lifeform, who I expected would call me, an Indian born, residing in the UK, as a “colonial, supremacist”; complete with semi-literate jargon and the obsessive tweeting. Score another one for stereotype accuracy. I hesitate to dwell on the irony, or the poor grammar. I suppose those are also hetero-patriarchal-supremacist concepts.

Barnesmoore’s “response” responds to nothing that I wrote. It’s a rant:

"The barbarians of the north have indeed awakened. We are marching on Rome. ‘Today Rome will burn.’(Chronixx 2012) Only then will we return to reciprocal cosmologies/ontologies of dualism wherein virtue/justice/goodness understood as dependent upon wedding the polarities of natural dualities like light/dark and masculine/feminine. Only then will we remember that we are a part of nature. Only then will we remember that we are one. Only then will we remember how to love. Only then will we remember how to be human. Only then will shed the sickly quest to impose an artificial replica of the Nothing-Infinite Eternal’s unity and regularity upon manifestation through domination of difference and irregularity."

And more like that for two pages. Undeterred by his rhetorical limitations, in his comical anarchist zeal, our protagonist persevered. Needless to mention, with that prose, the scope of his future academic achievement remains limited and bleak.

Barnesmoore doesn’t even like Marxism that much anymore, because “its preservation of the hierarchical worldview(s) of its Greco-Roman/Abrahamic antecedents (e.g. ‘wanting to conquer nature’) is exactly what renders the redeeming qualities as null and void.” He almost made me nostalgic for Trotsky, here, saying, “Man … will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build people’s palaces on the peaks of the Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic.” I prefer old Bronstein [Trotsky] to a twerking climate Chippendales reject any day of the week.

My original argument was simple. Everything that you’re being fed in the name of environmentalism is neo-paganist gobbledygook, which seeks to destroy all that has been created in the Judeo-Christian (and capitalist) west. It aspires to take away right to property, private ownership, freedom of individual actions and thoughts, and it seeks to topple the edifice of enlightenment and capitalism. And it is cynically being used by ideologues, who are opposed to the west, as they see that as the manifestation of everything, they deem evil, something, which is so patently obvious to anyone with a functioning brain and double-digit IQ, that it barely needs elaboration.

It is prudent to ignore trolls, as one often does on twitter or emails or in the comment sections. Trolls offer nothing new, and they feed on attention. Deny them attention, and they crawl back to their pathetic existence. I could have also ignored this particular one. But I chose not to, because of two reasons. Sometimes you need to gut one, to make an example. Barnesmoore is a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with Western academia. His academic profile led me to “An Anarchist Manifesto” and “The Elephant in the Room: Abrahamic Worldview(s) and Terrorism”, jargon-clotted screeds against capitalism and Christianity. For example:

"Rather than anarchical self/collective-governance centered in/oriented by the liminal space between time and the timeless that exists within each of us, we come to believe that we must be governed by an external authority like the child murdering, genocide ordering fallen trickster who masquerades as creator in the Old Testament."

A cross between a Monty Python skit and a postmodern jargon random text generator, our protagonist is also a standard Western activist/academic—a polysyllabic apologist for whatever thugs of the day want an excuse to take a crowbar to anyone who wants to defend thought, decency, or civilization; grooming urban insurgents for barbarism, in Washington, London, and throughout the West. Some are members of the Extinction Rebellion cult. Others are lonely Eco-Fascist losers, such as the El Paso and the Christchurch shooters, enraged by the very existence of the civilization to which they owe everything including the laptops on which they type their Internet rants.

Pity. I’m one of those “colonial, supremacist, capitalist, conservatives” who thinks we should take climate change seriously, and think up sensible policy solutions to address its dangers. But the witch doctors summoning up demons to dismantle civilization and usher in the Long Night are a much larger threat than an extra two inches of seawater on the London quays. Our taxpayers and tuition dollars pay the salaries for all such Barnesmoores. Bad enough we’ve got no end of buffoons; worse to be forced to pay for them. In a good world, Barnesmoore would have to do some manual labour for a living.

I suppose that’s the demon that haunts one’s sleep.

SOURCE 




Australia: 'No one listened and then someone died': Fisherman explains why he NEVER lets his family swim in the ocean as the number of hungry, killer sharks increases

Greenie protection of sharks responsible

Fishermen have warned more people will be killed following an explosion in Queensland's shark population and a string of attacks in the water.

Two British backpackers have this week been mauled near Airlie Beach as they snorkelled in the Whitsundays.

Alistair Raddon, 28, had his right foot bitten off as his friend Danny Maggs, 22, copped a leg bite on Tuesday morning.

The shark attacks occurred only a month after Queensland's Labor government removed more than 160 drumlines from 27 beaches.

This followed a Federal Court ruling which ordered the end of shark culling in the Great Barrier Reef.

Nathan Rynn, a Townsville-based commercial net fisherman who operates between Cardwell and Bowen, near Airlie Beach, said surging shark numbers would cause more fatal attacks in the water.

'We've got a catastrophe waiting to happen,' he told Daily Mail Australia on Friday. 'If the government doesn't place some more protection over tourists, swimmers and recreational users, there's going to be more and more of these deaths every year because their numbers are exploding and they're getting hungry.'

Mr Rynn is so worried about predatory sharks in the murky waters of north Queensland he advises his own children to stay out of the water in Townsville.
'Once upon a time, I would have taken them to the local beaches here,' he said.

'If I see mothers or fathers with their kids running down into the water, and they're a fair distance off the beach, I go and tell them, "If I was you, I'd get your kids out".'

David Swindells, a commercial fisherman based at Yeppoon in central Queensland, said he advised swimmers to avoid deep water.

'Put it this way: I'd advise them to stay in shallow water,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'Only go up around your knees.' 

In November 2018, Melbourne medical researcher Daniel Christidis, 33, died after being attacked at Cid Harbour at Whitsunday Island during a trip with friends and colleagues.

That tragedy followed two separate attacks – also at Cid harbour – on Tasmanian woman Justine Barwick and 12-year-old Melbourne girl Hannah Papps within 24 hours in September.

Well before those spate of attacks, Mr Rynn said he and other fishermen had warned Queensland's Department of Agriculture and Fisheries about the danger of the surging shark population.

'I warned the department about two to three years ago about the increase in shark numbers - it wasn't just myself - there were other guys that were giving them information on shark predation in our fishing nets,' he said.

'Before last year's attack at Cid Harbour, I said that there's only a matter of time there's someone going to be killed. Bang. We had someone unfortunately killed.'

Mr Swindells said shark numbers had exploded after fishermen were banned from culling them. 'Since they've stopped us culling them, there's been a massive explosion in the shark population,' he said.

'There had not been as many shark attacks as there are now so why would they remove the drumlines to put the general public at risk?'

Mr Swindells, a director of the Queensland Seafood Industry Association, said the state Labor government appeared to be removing shark drumlines in a bid to chase Greens preferences in Brisbane electorates.

The drumlines were removed in September, however, after animal rights group Humane Society International challenged the policy in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

The Federal Court in September upheld the AAT's April decision, despite a challenge from the state government.

In 2015, former Queensland fisheries minister Bill Byrne, then the Labor member for Rockhampton, told Parliament there had only been one death at a shark control beach in the 53 years since drumlines had been introduced.

'For decades, Queensland's Shark Control Program has made it safe to swim in our surf,' he said.

'Since the program began in 1962, there has been only one shark fatality at a shark control beach in Queensland.'

Put another way, sharks have killed as many swimmers near Queensland beaches during the past year as the previous 56.

SOURCE 

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